Cracking creativity #6

The other night, I finished Cracking Creativity (see here – here – here – here – and here). In all, it has been a very interesting book for me to read, but then again this is the first creativity book that I have read. Many of the things Michael Michalko writes about were new to me. My ambition was to learn more about creativity, which I certainly have – and in doing so I have learned many techniques that I know will be useful in my life as a programmer.

I must say that this book is somewhat repetitive – although I can’t say that this is definitely a bad thing. It seems that the general principle of the mind, underlying these techniques, is that your thoughts tend to follow the same lines as when you previously have thought about similar things – which is why you either don’t see the problem as it really is, or don’t see the alternatives to the solution you have come up with. Because of this I often got the feeling that Michalko was repeating himself.

But then again, each technique has a somewhat different approach, which means that you get many examples of how you can “trick” your brain into thinking unconventionally – as well as alternatives when choosing techniques for solving your problems. So it’s a good thing, too. Perhaps it should be seen as more of a catalog of creativity techniques.

Reading this book, I have realized that it’s very important for people in creative professions to read a little about how creativity works (which means that essentially everybody should, since creativity is about solving problems and not merely “creating stuff”). And I’d at least recommend this book to those, like me, who haven’t read any creativity books before – and especially to programmers, since there’s room for a lot more creativity in software; very few apps are innovative, I think. ––– I’ll have to go now, but I think I’ll return to this book in future posts.