5 practical ways to be more creative

Hey creative folks!

You might try to find various ways to get the rid of boredom and for that you pursue creative approach, but most of the time you need boredom to stay ‘genuinely’ creative.

You have to be an extraordinary boring person (for others) and you’ll find it very interesting for yourself.

Being a creative person requires a lot of energy and concentration to observe things around. You can’t do this efficiently if you are wasting your energy onto something senseless.

So let me get started on few basic practical things to start being more creative.

Start doodling

It is not about how good art or doodle you make. It’s just that are you trying or not? That’s all!

Doodles are interesting and the best thing about them is that whatever you make is a masterpiece of its own.

So you don’t need to worry about the quality or the clarity of your doodle! Just try it!

Here are few observed benefits of making doodles.

1. It provokes you to observe things around
2. You can draw your ideas and it’s execution process
3. You can plan things in a funny, interesting and better way without any restrictions
4. People will call you creative for real.

Okay enough! What’s practical in it?

Alright!

Start with pencil and a tiny notebook!

Not so caring?

Get digital sketchbook or an app!

No no, It’s not necessary to have a stylus to create doodles on phone while you’ve got fingers! Don’t act so fancy about stylus.

Here is the list of apps you can use for making doodles or sketches.

1. Tayasui Sketches
2. Autodesk Sketchbook
3. Snapchat
4. Any other drawing app you like

I use Tayasui Sketches and Snapchat to doodle.

Well now you have resources but where to start?

Here are few cartoonist and doodlers you can check on Instagram, try to imitate them, get inspiration and make your very own doodles about anything.

1. @pungme
2. @thenearsightedmonkey
3. @dawning_crow
4. @davidshringley
5. Find more and add to the list

If you want to see my doodles, check here.

Read books written by creative folks

Very generalized advice. Everyone says that

OK then, I am telling you where to start from.

Start with these three books at first.

1. Keep going
2. Steal like an artist
3. Share you work

All these three book are written by Austin Kleon.

These books will tell you about what to do and how to start your journey towards actually doing things you love.

Now pick up references from books and go through them, this will start a better cycle of reading good stuff.

Few more books I can recommend to you :

1. The art of noticing
2. The daily rituals
3. A brief History of humankind

These are just some recommendations, I found them as references and are worth recommending.

This blog post tells you about 12 books that every creative person need to read.

If you’re interested in physics, I have a list of few interesting physics books you can enjoy diving in.

Start collecting things

This is a broad category because you can collect almost anything like magazines, pebbles, tickets, toys, old letters and photographs, postcards, marriage-cards, specific newspapers, notebooks of your elders, movies, music, books, websites or blog articles, quotes, CDs or cassette, old-tech or electrical junk and almost everything you can.

For collection of digital things like movies, music, quotes, texts, digital photographs, you can make a private blog for yourself with blogger or open an account on Pinterest.

You can use few services like Pocket and Instapaper to collect websites, blog articles.

You can digitize physical things like fragile old postcards and letters by scanning them or by taking a good photograph.

Use cardboard boxes to collect magazines and newspapers like this.

I have almost 3 cardboard boxes like this stuffed with this magazine, and whenever I need to see new stuff, I pick up and start reading them.

I use a dressing table rack to put my old tech and electrical junk and call it my ‘tiny-laboratory’.

Collect stuff, take pictures, save it to the catalogue/journal of your collection and write something about it. You can make an e-journal as well on notion.

I made a notion template for the collection catalogue/journal, you can use that to make your own collection catalogue/journal.

Explore the crafty internet

The almighty internet has always been a great place to explore and learn things you want to do.

Learn new and different crafts regularly like origami or paper–crafts, electric toys, make household decorative items, wooden crafts, garden accessories, plastic bottle crafts.

Here are few resources that could help you to learn various type of crafts.

1. Arvindguptatoys.com

“The best thing a child can do with a toy is break it !” says Arvind Gupta, an Indian toy inventor and expert in science.

This website contains plenty of science toys made from scratch and you will be amused by learning anyone of them.

2. Instructables.com

Instructables is a community for people who like to make things. You can learn making all kind of crafts with step by step method.

It includes categories like circuits, workshop, cooking, crafts etc.

Visit this website, choose your category and have fun.

3. Jo Nakashima

Try learning origami (an art of paper folding) and make tons of interesting shapes.

Check my practice project tangramm which is illustrations based in Chinese puzzle art Tangram.

4. Hackaday.io

Hackaday.io is the world’s largest collaborative hardware development community. It includes various kinds of DIY hardware projects like respberry pi, arduino, robotics, home automation and much more.

Personally I’m interested in arduino and home automation hardware projects.

You can enjoy learning new things here.

Learn things apart from what you do usually

Let’s say you’re a medical student like me and you’re supposed to study about medical stuff but just don’t limit yourself to it, read and learn things apart from medical world as well

You can read history, economics, politics, engineering and whatever you are interested in. There to so much more out there learn about.

Try gaining knowledge new technologies like cryptocurrency, web 3.0, NFTs, Metaverse etc.

You will never feel regret of doing it. These things will provide you a solid knowledge base to start doing anything in your life apart from medical skills.

Learn to code! It is essential today and will give you freedom to make anything you want and that will open thousands of ways to be creative.

Doesn’t matter what academic course you’re pursuing, you should learn how to code.

I will write a detail blog post about get into coding, so that you can easily know how to get started with minimal resources.

In shorts :

Don't limit yourself to only one field.

Bonus tip on how to be creative : Keep your hairs long and messy (Girls do have an advantage over that )

Let’s summarize the chapter!

5 practical ways to be more creative

1. Start doodling
2. Read books written by creative folks
3. Start collecting things
4. Explore the crafty internet
5. Learn apart from what you’re supposed to

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Happy Learning!