CHALLENGE 2 | DAY 11 | All about creativity

13 january '14

How to capture your creativity

First note
Our creative potential is virtually shut don by early schooling. When there is no time for fun, eventually creativity will vanish.

Second note
The myths about creativity keeps us shore bound.

- With the right skills you can boost your creativity by a factor 10 or more.
- Creativity is an extension of what you already know
- New behavior and ideas emerge as old behaviors interact
- Behavior flows and it never stops changing
- Creativity is always an individual process
- Groups are better at selecting good ideas than at generating them.

4 techniques for a creative boost

1. Capturing
- Pay attention to new ideas that occur
- When an idea or thought flows in your mind, write it down
- Three B's for places, which are popular, to capture ideas. The Bed, Bath and Bus

2. Challenging
- Put yourself in difficult situations
- Go for open ended problem solving. As many as possible solutions
- Try to solve "Ultimate Problems"
a. You have 24 hours to create world peace
b. One year to stop pollution and prevent future pollution 
c. Stop the process of aging
- Failure is a great wellspring of creativity

3. Broadening
- Train often
- Train diverse
- Take courses in subjects you know nothing about

4. Surrounding
- Surround yourself by diverse and ever changing stimuli

Source: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200910/capturing-creativity

CHALLENGE 1 | DAY 10 | 30 day challenges and learn to blog

12 january '14

Writing skills. What? 

The quest about better blogging takes me to sites about writing skills. I need skills or methods to improve my writing. On the website +wikihow you can find a article about methods for improving your writing.

Method 1 The basics
- Write active instead of passive
- Use strong words, but this doesn't mean you use complicated words
- Write simple direct and clear
- Let readers discover what you mean, don't explain it in detail
- Avoid cliches
- Break the rules
- Keep editing

Method 2 Read a lot of books
- Read classic good books and learn to understand why it's classic.
- Go to theatre, read newspapers, magazines
- Try not to copy the style of classical good writers. Do some free writing exercise to discover your own style

Method 3 Write a lot, write often, write as much as you can
- Write everything that comes to mind down in a notebook
- Buy a new notebook when the first one is full
- Go for a writing class, do a workshop, learn from other people
- Just write every single day!

Writing or blogging, in my situation it's the same. I write every day, except on saturdays. Maybe it's time to read more classic novels. The books I read are all non-fiction. That's what I like. I will write a book this year and that will be a non fiction, informative book. This methods as described above, might come in handy.
16th of march there is a writing workshop in Amsterdam. +www.schrijfatelier.nl organizes a training for column writing. This looks interesting and I put it in my agenda.