Creative Business

Posts in this category are for creative entrepreneurs who want to increase their influence and income… the creative way.

Creativity: The Four Key Components

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How do you know if you are actually engaged in a creative process?  Is there a way to tell?

Evaluating creativity and creative intelligence is not easy.  By definition, creativity involves a unique, spontaneous and free-flowing activity, approach or outcome which analysis wants to generalise, regulate and contain in order to understand.

One common confusion is to conflate creativity with “genius” or “talent”.

It's important to recognise that prodigious skills, or advanced mathematical reasoning, or advanced sensory-motor coordination (the practiced interactions between hand and eye deployed by a skilled painter or musician, for example) are

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Eight Habits of The Creatively Intelligent

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Want to be more creative?  Creative Intelligence is not a “given” but a process, a practice.

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An approach to living.

Here are habits of living that all creative people have fostered in themselves:

1. Ask Questions

What if?  Why?  Why not?  How?  How many of the world's great inventions or artworks would never have happened if their creators hadn't asked.

2. Embrace Change

It's happening, whether you like it or not.  Might as well

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8 Stages of The Creative Process #2: Percolation

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Wolfgang  Amadeus Mozart has given us a wonderful description of percolation, the most enigmatic stage of the composition process:  “When I am… completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer — say, travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas

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Eight Stages of Writing #1: Preparation

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Preparation: The Challenge

The challenge in this phase is to give preparation enough time, but no more than that.  Many beginning writers get stuck in this phase, unable to move on; others (me!) avoid it altogether and plunge right into working, which is just as debilitating.

Preparation: The Steps

Step 1: Create Time.

When are you going to work?  First thing in the morning? Last thing at night, after the day's work and the kids are in bed?  Your choice — but once you've decided, take out your diary and mark out the time blocks. They don't have to be big but they must be regular.  A 17th-century French Chancellor, D'Aguesseau, on noticing that his wife was habitually 10 minutes late coming down to dinner decided to

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