It was apparent something needed to change. At other times you may just feel it’s time to do something new. You feel the need for change but are not sure what that change should be or how to go about it. Maybe it feels that your life is just not as good as it could be. Sometimes the choices to be made are painful, sometimes exciting; sometimes confusing and sometimes clear as day.
Regardless of the choices to be made, they represent opportunities. Now, I don’t mean that in a pretentious self-help guru style, but in a pragmatic way – if you have to change something it might as well be to your benefit. So from now on in this book, all issues, problems, potential pickles and poohs, may be regarded as positive challenges and opportunities for life-enhancing change. To view them as any less is to disregard the freedom that surrounds us all.
Opportunities can come to us in two ways:
1. We can create them for ourselves and make them happen.
2. They come to us from the outside world. But in order for this to happen successfully, first we need to be clear about where we are in our lives and what we want so that when the opportunities are presented to us, we recognize them and take advantage of them.
Either route involves creativity, thinking differently and seeing the world in new ways. And that is what this book is about.
IF YOU KICK-START YOU CREATIVITY YOU’LL OPEN YOURSELF UP TO INSPIRING POSSIBILITIES
IF YOU RECOGNIZE YOUR INSPIRING POSSIBILITIES YOU’LL UNLOCK YOUR FREEDOM TO CHOOSE AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE
YOU ARE A CREATING MACHINE
You have some pretty amazing capabilities! As a human being you are naturally creative. And although our creative instincts tend to become suppressed, we have all the resources to change that around.
As time goes on, we are taught that there is a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ way of doing things. As a result, as adults our creativity often comes out more through luck than application. The ice-cream cone is a case in point. It was created by Ernest Hamwi in 1904 at the St Louis World’s Fair. He was selling waffles and next door to him was an ice-cream vendor who ran out of dishes. He rolled a waffle to put the ice cream in and the rest is history. Unfortunately, these lucky instances are few and far between.
As an example of the natural creativity of children, there’s a lovely story I came across recently about Johnny in a physics lesson. The teacher asks Johnny, ‘If I give you this barometer, how would you find out the height of that church steeple?’
Johnny, sure as you like, says, ‘That’s easy! I’d find the vicar and ask him if I were to give him this fabulous barometer, would he tell me the height of the steeple!’
The teacher says, ‘Wrong, Johnny. Tell me how you would really do it.’
So Johnny then responds with, ‘Well, I would climb to the top of the church, drop the barometer to the ground and count how long it takes to hit the ground. Knowing the accelerating force of gravity, I could work it out from that.’
At which point the teacher took a very dim view of Johnny’s future indeed. The problem was that the teacher was looking for one particular methodology to solve this question.
For him there was a right and a wrong answer. And yet Johnny had managed to create other great ways to solve it.
Throughout our lives we are trained to do the right thing, the right way. It begins with our parents, continues in school and gets reinforced at work and throughout life. We do need to learn how the world works, how to think logically and be effective in what we do, but by doing so we often lose the ability to be Johnny – to think tangentially and solve our puzzles in a creative way.
The great news is that we still have the same creative capabilities that we had when we were young – we have just forgotten how to use them.
Our brains are able to take in incredible amounts of information and automatically make unconscious connections between seemingly unconnected facts. Computers the world over are dwarfs to our giants. You can take information in so efficiently through your senses that you can even perceive the difference made by one single photon of light. This information is then processed non-stop by your incredible brain that works tirelessly.
We can then engage in a rich gamut of emotions that help us understand where our creative passions lie. We experience intuition. We even wake up in the middle of the night and have ideas come to us as if by magic. And we have the ability to take someone else’s ideas and improve on them.
Each of us has more or less the same ability to create, because we are all born with the same natural ability. We might need a bit of a mental workout, but the creative muscles are still there. We have ideas every single day. We can’t help it – we are human. The remarkable gift of human creativity is responsible for the very best advances made in human society.
Most importantly, you have the capability to improve your creative output every day for the rest of your life. You can choose to change your focus away from routine and habit, and instead experiment with newness and difference. If you make this your focus, this will have a life-changing impact on you.
In short, you have all the raw material to be truly brilliant in having ideas – in fact, you were built for it!
CREATING OPPORTUNITIES
As we have seen, opportunities are created in two ways:
1. By you
2. By the universe (world sounds just too small)
This book covers both.
BY THE UNIVERSE
Opportunities for us to ramp up our lives pop up every day. The world is so fast-paced and abundant that it constantly supplies us with possibilities for change and development. To tap into these opportunities, we need to collaborate with the Universe, firstly by discovering who we really are and what it is that we really want to give us a richly rewarding and fulfilling life.
At the same time, we must learn to develop a heightened state of awareness in order to notice the opportunities around us to which we would usually be blind. Often the universe is shouting ‘Hey dude! Yeah you! All that stuff you wanted, that bohemian, laid back, creative lifestyle, it’s here. WooooHOOO! You can have it now! Yeah you!…
… WAKE UP!’
So first, you have to be receptive to all the opportunities that the universe puts your way. You have to let go of all your preconceptions about your life and what you have been taught is right and wrong. These very important principles are all included in this book. Above all, you need to lighten up and have fun. By approaching the choices and ideas presented to you in a playful manner, you are far more likely to maximize your creative potential.
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