Another Way to Improve Your Creativity

Here's one : Practice constructing jokes and humourous lines (and remember the best test for Funny: are you laughing?)

This is best done not as a rejoinder to what someone else has said, but rather like Chris Tucker or Robin Williams on stage, try to start from 'nowhere' and arrive somewhere comedic (like some politicians, but that's another story...).

Naturally, you'll have to do what most 'creative people' do :

• think out of the box
• 'search' for the totally unexpected
• criss-cross mental patterns, switch contexts, juxtapose issues, etc.
• work with (literally) anything you can find
• put aside logical, analytical and critical thought (until the punch-line and even then it's implied, not stated)
• perform trial-and-error on any number of starting-points

(Be careful, though, of folks like Hannibal Lecter, Charles Manson, Nick Leeson and other norm-challenged personalities - learn the method, lose the madness).

Virtually nothing in school or college trains you on producing new ideas, or at least not formally. Standard education provides less instruction for how to be creative as opposed to where (usually, the toilet walls).

Yet the good joke-tellers and seriously creative folk have one thing in common: They tend to look/sound stupid or weird but they always have fresh ideas and, most importantly, they see and recommend a world different from what most people expect.

Far-out and Funny are the new Yin and Yang.