Innovative thinking doesn’t require an innate talent or special technique. It isn’t limited to artists or inventors or any other group of people. If you want to develop your innovative thinking skills, focus on these five characteristics.
1. Be Curious
Curiosity prepares your brain for learning and long-term memory. It also activates the brain’s reward system. When you’re curious about something, you anticipate discovering more about it. And your brain treats the answer or the new knowledge the same way it treats any kind of reward—by releasing hits of dopamine.
Curiosity increases activity in the hippocampus, which involves the creation of memories. When there is a higher level of interactivity between the reward system and the hippocampus, your brain is more likely to remember the new information—as well as incidental information you encountered along the way.
Curiosity may put the brain in a state that allows it to learn and retain any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it. –Dr. Matthias Gruber, UC Davis
2. Be Passionate
When you’re passionate about learning something, creating something, or solving a particular problem, working on it doesn’t feel like work no matter how effortful it might be. Passion is motivating. It keeps you engaged and helps you through the rough or confusing spots, so you’re more likely to keep going instead of getting bored or giving up. Obsession isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When you’re passionate about something, you spend more time working with or thinking about it, which expands your capacity for innovation and creativity within that area.
The more different kinds of experiences you have and the more you learn, in general, the more opportunities you give yourself to discover what you’re passionate about. This isn’t the same thing as “finding your passion.” You can be passionate about several things at the same time or about different things over the course of your life.
Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks. –Yo-Yo Ma
3. Be Willing to Fail
The unconscious part of the brain is risk averse, but while avoiding risks can get you incremental gains, it won’t really get you innovation or invention. It’s true that just because you can imagine something, that doesn’t mean it’s possible or viable. On the other hand, you won’t know until you try.
The occurrence of failure is less important than how you respond to it. If you treat it as feedback (information), there is always something you can learn from it to help you decide what to do next. If you treat it as evidence that there’s something wrong with you or your idea or course of action, you’re unlikely to get anything out of it.
And the failure to solve a problem can actually be the key to its eventual solution:
Failure to solve a problem stimulates your brain to store a special, easily retrieved memory of the problem. This memory energizes all of your associations to the information in the problem, sensitizing you to anything in your environment that might be relevant. —John Kounios and Mark Beeman, The Eureka Factor
There are no guarantees in life. If you can learn to live with uncertainty and recognize failure as feedback, you’re actually more likely to succeed.
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. –Thomas A. Edison
4. Take Action
I’ll let Tim Ferris take this one: “Not yet!” one might say (and I have said often). More research, more preparation, more interviews, more… procrastination. Let’s call it what it often is: a forgiving term for a terrible habit. To create anything remarkable, it takes not one giant leap after perfect prep, but many baby steps in the right direction once you have barely enough to get started. To start something big, you have to first start something small.
The keywords here are “start something.” When you take action, you get more information in the form of feedback and you learn things you wouldn’t have learned if you simply continued thinking about your project. Taking any action can have unexpected results and undesired consequences. Although you can anticipate that such things might occur, you can’t plan for them because you won’t know what they are until after they happen.
An excellent motto to adopt is create and adjust. Until you begin actively creating, you have nothing to adjust.
5. Use Both Parts of Your Brain
Creativity and innovative thinking involve both parts of the brain—the conscious and the unconscious. Sometimes you need to apply focused (System 2) attention, which is linear, logical, effortful, and slow. But attempting to sustain System 2 attention is counterproductive. Sometimes you need unfocused (System 1) attention, which is associative, non-logical, runs in the background, and is fast.
Too much logical, linear thinking is as bad as too little. After framing the problem or situation and considering possible solutions, turn it over to your unconscious for a while and see what it comes up with. Let your mind wander instead of keeping it on a tight leash. Research indicates that if you take a break from a problem and come back to it later, you’re more likely to be able to solve the problem than you would be if you continued working on it without the interruption.
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