Creativity: It Takes Imagination and Without It I'd Be Lost

What can I create today? It's how I start each morning. It's what is making me write this article! What does being creative even mean? How does it even happen? To most individuals, they refer to the arts – writing, painting, sculpting, and music for instance. However creativity applies to everything – anything fresh, anything that's never been created earlier. Being creative takes imagination and after doing some research, I've found there are two types of imagination for creativity. Join me as we take a journey into imagination.

Creative Imagination
Creative imagination, which lies on the far side of our logical mind and our ego, is where all genuinely new ideas derive from. When a scientist devises something the globe has never seen before, he's using creative imagination. Consider it as new clay.

Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were well-known inventors who learned to tap into creative imagination. Mr. Edison, for instance, was reported as having tested more than ten thousand ideas for his electric-light bulb using his synthetic imagination alone, and they all failed. It was only when he tapped into his creative imagination that he carried off the perfect electric-light bulb.

Synthetic Imagination
What is this synthetic imagination? This is the imagination delivered of education and experience. You apply your mind to alter things around, view them from another angle, or rearrange existing stuff to form something “new”. But nothing really new ever came from synthetic imagination.

How much of what you accomplish has never been witnessed before (by you, at any rate)? When you author a fresh book, are you regrouping stories or legends you’ve seen before, substituting characters, hacking and exchanging? When you write a new musical composition, are you truly only changing one of your preferred childhood songs? When you do a fresh marketing campaign, are you simply placing your own spin on a successful campaign already used by some other company?

​Most modern creative thinking books available are in reality centering on your synthetic imagination. But there's nothing inappropriate about this; as a matter of fact it's a critical step. An original idea frequently needs to be forged by education, reasoning, and experience in order to forge a finished product.

Let me sidetrack a bit here. All thoughts, all goals, everything we would like to achieve starts out as an idea mentally, and is forged by hand physically. Anything humankind ever created started out as a thought. Anything humankind ever created was forged by hand.

I know I find myself in the synthetic creative mode constantly. I look at existing ideas and concepts and shape them in my own way. I do it to add value not only to myself, but hopefully others as well. Some resonate right out of the box, some take time, and some just never do and disappear. But, I'm always willing to give it a try.

So what makes an idea a great idea? There are 4 things found here. 
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