陇山陇西郡
宁静纯我心 感得事物人 写朴实清新. 闲书闲话养闲心,闲笔闲写记闲人;人生无虞懂珍惜，以沫相濡字字真。
My thought: both are part of mosaic picture. Both are ingredient of salad mix dish.
Cutting off WeChat frees up my time as I addicted to it for sucking new information. I guess I gotta to Remind myself that sometimes having more ideas means taking in less information.
Information exploded to bombard brain, until you exhaust its power to create.
Why?
Two traits they share are a willingness to take risks and to think differently—and in order to be an innovative thinker, one must use imagination and nurture creativity.
If you read too much, know too much, you're intimidated to take risks, to think differently - so, that's why college drop-outs like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Mike Dell, dared to do, knowing little help adventure out to unknown, uncharted lands.
""Working in academia comes with a ton of stress. Professor Christine L. Mummery gives insights into finding a healthy work life balance in research. Watch the full video here. http://bit.ly/2jFFp4k
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6 Ways to Tap Into Your Creative Self
My teenage daughter, who is interested in psychology and preparing for college, asked me recently: “Mom, what is the one thing that you can’t live without?” I immediately thought, love. And I think that is probably true. I have the best chance to live a successful and fulfilling life if I am in a committed loving relationship and have loving people and pets around me.
I shared my thoughts with her. She responded, “That’s great mom. You have love, so now what? What is the most important thing? What do you most want to do with your days and with your life?”
It got me thinking about how I best like to spend my days and the kind of work I do. I am happiest when I feel challenged and creative. If I had a mundane job doing the same thing eight hours a day to get a paycheck, I wouldn’t be happy. Creativity is the drive and energy behind my best-spent days and most successful endeavors. I am at my best when I have a new idea and I am “cooking”—my fingers tapping happily at the keyboard or literally cooking away in the kitchen.
Creativity. What is it? I like the simple definition from Merriam-Webster: “the ability to make new things or think of new ideas.”
Related: A 4-Question Guide to Unlock Your Creativity
When we think about our lives and how we wish to live, we need to make an effort to incorporate and nurture creativity daily. Because it can help you be successful. Think of innovators like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Thomas Edison and Leonardo da Vinci; they accomplished great things with their lives and affected the lives of people all over the world. What sets high achievers, such as this group, apart from the rest of us? Two traits they share are a willingness to take risks and to think differently—and in order to be an innovative thinker, one must use imagination and nurture creativity.
What can you do to unleash and tap into the creativity within yourself? Here are six ideas:
1. Keep a journal.
Something about writing frees us to express ourselves, gain clarity and come up with new ideas. Simply write, and don’t worry about what you are writing about or how good your words look on the page. Don’t edit; just write! If you need some suggestions, write a word or phrase such as purpose or my strengths. Then begin.
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
—Sylvia Plath
2. Draw.
Whether you think you can draw doesn’t matter. Get a sketch pad and a variety of writing tools, like colored pencils and markers, charcoal and pastels or crayons. Like your journal writing, it’s not important what or how you draw so much as that you just do it. For some great ideas, I highly recommend Michael Gelb’s How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci. Toward the end of the book, Gelb has a wonderful section, “The Beginner’s Da Vinci Drawing Course.” This will help get you started. We all can draw—the purpose of it is discovery.
3. Spend time outside.
Try taking your journal and sketch pads outdoors. Exposure to fresh air, the sounds of wildlife, seeing the color green and enjoying the benefits of vitamin D from sunlight will all help you feel your best and be your most creative. When I have writer’s block, all I need to do is take my laptop outside to my beautiful back patio, and all of a sudden my brain is flowing with new energy and ideas.
4. Get moving.
Taking a walk or doing some simple stretches will help renew your body and mind. It’s hard to feel creative when you’re sitting at a desk all day. As soon as I get out and take a short walk, I feel better. Exciting and new ideas surface and then I can’t wait to return to my computer to write them all down.
“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
5. Remember to play.
Just because we are all grown up does not mean that we don’t need to play. Dr. Stuart Brown, M.D., founder of The National Institute for Play, compares play to oxygen: “It’s all around us, yet goes mostly unnoticed or unappreciated until it is missing.”
By nurturing our playful sides, we feel more joyful and creative. Try these ideas to start playing again: Set an intention to play more; keep fun things accessible (like puzzles, coloring books, Play-Doh, a hula hoop, etc.); try a new fitness class at the gym or an art class in your community; or get goofy and horse around with the kids, grandkids, neighbors’ kids or pets.
“Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.”
—Joseph Chilton Pearce
6. Be a lifelong learner.
Never stop questioning things, be a voracious reader, watch TED Talks, attend lectures, take courses and listen to podcasts. As long as we are learning, we are growing. Being curious and gaining knowledge will help us come up with ideas we need to prosper and succeed in life. Tony Robbins calls it “CANI”: Constant and Never-Ending Improvement.
“Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.”
—Leo Burnett
Related: Low on Creative Juices? Give Yourself a Break
Debra DiPietro is a 2015 SUCCESS BlogStars winner, nominated and voted upon as one of the most influential self-development writers and bloggers on the web for her blog, The Warm Milk Journal.
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Personal Development
How a Brain Dump Can Unlock Your Creativity
For knowledge workers, entrepreneurs and creatives, generating new ideas isn’t just nice; it’s an economic necessity. Ironically, though, making more content, posting new materials, reading and processing more information isn’t always the answer to achieving deeper creativity. Anyone who has struggled to fall asleep at night as the train of too many ideas chugged through the brain, or who has had the experience of sitting down to write only to feel pulled in a million different directions knows this intuitively.
Related: 6 Ways to Tap Into Your Creative Self?
And the science bears this out. As researchers Shira Baror and Moshe Bar from Bar-Ilan University’s Brain Research Center have found, individuals with a lot on their minds tend to be less creative. To arrive at this finding, the experimenters ran a word association test, while also giving some participants a list of very long numbers to remember at the beginning of the experiment and others very short numerical lists. What they found was that overwhelmingly the people given lots to keep track of before undertaking the creative word association task came up with the most common responses. Whereas the people given little to keep track of tended to have the most innovative and diverse word associations. Put simply, less cognitive load meant more creativity.
So, what can we do about cognitive load? We all live in the world, don’t we? The good news is that with practice, we may be able to reduce the creativity-sucking load on our working memories. As recent neurological research demonstrates, with practice, we can intentionally clear out our minds, thereby freeing up our creative juices. Specifically, meditation allows practitioners to engage what University of Florida’s Dr. Deshmukh calls a “cognitive pause and unload” (CPU) technique that frees attentional space for greater creativity.
Put in simpler, non-neuroscience terms, CPU is meditation. This is not necessarily clear-your-mind-of-all-thought meditation—though if you can achieve that, great!—but more so focusing so intensely on the present and consistently redirecting your attention to the present that you start retraining your brain to release all the built-up ruminations on the past while you focus on the moment at hand.
If you’re a meditation and mindfulness skeptic, it may be worth reviewing the growing number of high profile meditators in fields ranging from hip-hop to stand-up comedy, acting to newscasting. One of the film industry’s most famous meditators, the wildly creative David Lynch offers a useful metaphor of liquid flowing to help explain the effects clearing the mind can have on creativity. He says, “Ideas flow through a conduit. Stress squeezes that conduit. Tension, depression, hate, anger squeezes it.” Similarly, the patron saint of entrepreneurship and self-reinvention Oprah Winfrey has written about the importance of unplugging and letting go to her work: “Now when I begin to feel exhausted, I pull back. If I’m at work and people are lined up at my desk with one request after another, I literally go sit in my closet and refuel.” Neither of these figures could be described as a slouch, and a look at Lynch’s filmography or Oprah’s many business ventures offers a suggestive hint of the kind of openness to possibility that may be accessible when we let go a bit. Perhaps counterintuitively, trying to process less allows us to be more. And who wouldn’t want that?
If you think you are meditation averse or resistant, the good news is that there are many choices about the present-moment experience you can focus on: For many meditators, focusing intently on the breath moving in and out may be useful; others focus on a candle flame. But if you’re just starting, you might do something as simple as focusing intently for a few minutes on massaging scented lotion into your skin, redirecting your attention to the smell and sensation whenever your mind starts to wander.
As important as the ability to focus may be, a big part of what makes meditation a useful way to refresh the brain for creative work comes from its emphasis on disengaging attention from what’s not helpful (in this case, all the built-up material in your working memory).
Now, what if you’re not in a position to sit and meditate on a flame? Facing co-workers’ funny looks may not be conducive to meditation as a technique for clutter-clearing your mind. A number of other workplace-friendly possibilities are still available:
First, if at all possible, do your most creative work first thing in the day before other information creeps in, cluttering your attention.
Second, you might write down a brain dump in a notebook, letting all that’s on your mind flow freely onto the page. At the end of your dump, write a note to yourself about the main focus for your day. Take a big breath in and out and say, this is my creative task for the day.
Third, a similar technique involves capturing rogue thoughts on a sticky note or scrap paper in your workplace, thus assuring yourself that you aren’t losing track of the thoughts that pop up, but without full directing your attention to them.
Finally, once you do clear your head, don’t rush to fill it back up with junk. Try to stay off social media and news sites while doing your creative work. Remind yourself that sometimes having more ideas means taking in less information.
Related: How to Be Constantly Creative
https://www.success.com/article/how-a-brain-dump-can-unlock-your-creativity
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Lee Strobel Verified account @LeeStrobel
Well, it may be time to clean my office.pic.twitter.com/hdXbSYbG3c
