The Pursuit of Crazyness

The Pursuit of “Crazyness”

Creativity has always been a fascinating virtue highly sought-after. Commonly defined by the dictionaries as the ability to generate new and meaningful ideas, the value of creativity is immense. While creativity definitely exists within the form of an art or theatrical performance, the tangible and perhaps more practical value of creativity can be associated through the ideas and innovations generated in our daily lives. Ranging from a simple and creative idea a company employee may generate to help reduce production cost, to great inventions such as the light bulb and the telephone, these ideas and innovations have propelled the economic growth and development of our society.

Having seen the value of creativity, the billion-dollar question now would be, how do we get creative?

In the past, I have always thought that I am a very uncreative person. To start with, there weren’t many instances where I felt my thoughts were being creative and different from my peers. Moreover, the continual failing grades I get in Art classes and my inaptness in learning the piano have further discouraged me to think that I am creative. However, through the Creative Thinking class I am currently attending in SMU, and some personal research and readings which I have done, I have gained a different dimension in realizing the creativity within me and that creativity exist in many different forms. In fact, I have even been convinced that “a kick of crazyness” in our daily lives does help us become more creative.

While there have been some scientific evidences linking creative and crazy people (Andreasen), what I mean by crazyness doesn’t absolutely mean that we should behave like crazy people, dancing naked on the streets or killing our pets for dinner. What I do mean is to look at life from a different perspective and breaking away from our conventional problem solving processes. Some elements of defiance and absurdity will aid in establishing such crazyness, which will open us to a myriad of problem solving possibilities and opportunities.

One useful way of adopting crazyness is that of “Lateral Thinking” (Bono, Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step, 1973). Recognizing that creativity is not innate but a learnable skill, Edward de Bono’s famous concept of “Lateral Thinking” advocates the thinking of the solutions away from the traditional or expected outcome. The strategies in “Lateral Thinking” include free association, reversal, distortion, liberalization and factoring, to provide a virtually infinite amount of solutions to solve the problem. Provocative operations have also been mentioned, where one is forced to think forward to a different part of the problem where new ideas can be generated from different perspective. For instance, if we are asked to solve the problem of congestion in Orchard Road, lateral thinking will push us to think of a vast range of solutions such as banning cars on Orchard Road and can think of a better transportation system