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Creativity is a trait many consider to be unlearnable-they believe it arises out of innate talent or a similarly abstract aptitude. But what if I told you that there were things you could do to foster your creative side?

As it turns out, creativity is more akin to a learned skill than an innate quality. If we consider creativity to be the ability to extend ideas given a basic premise, this sort of extrapolation should be dependent on observing patterns and thus be trainable.

in Business News Daily breaks this concept down: "At the core is the ability to look at problems from different angles, to connect and combine concepts, and the ability to challenge traditional assumptions. These are skills that require practice to master."

Let's explore some of the ways in which any person can give their creative side a boost.
1. Practice Pattern Recognition
One way to foster creativity is through recognizing patterns in what we observe. For example, if you read a lot of detective novels, you might realize that detective fiction uses a finite number of motifs and be able to predict the outcome of stories with similar premises.

Of course, some people are better than others at picking up patterns quickly, but you can sharpen your pattern-recognition skills in a variety of ways by studying math, nature or art.
2. Pick Up a Musical Instrument
Musical instruments and the coordination of mind and body that is involved in producing music can nurture your creative side. Picking up an instrument like the piano can lead to great benefits as you begin practicing and internalizing the basic finger movements.

The connection between creative power and practicing music is well demonstrated , and many famous figures, including Albert Einstein, Oliver Sacks and Paul Klee, attributed part of their success to their exposure to music.
3. Play Chess
While chess may not seem like the most creative hobby, there is a surprising amount of depth associated with the game and its various positions. The opening, middle game and endgame all have specific, repeatable patterns that blend into each other just enough to allow for creative maneuvers.

Studies have shown that chess players outperformed a control group in the areas of fluency, originality and flexibility.
4. Exercise
Believe it or not, a bout of strenuous exercise can do wonders for getting your creative juices flowing. If we're too sedentary, we become vulnerable to one set of thought patterns and never try to break out of those strictures.

A study published in the NIH indicated that exercise was a surefire way to combat things like mental fog and fatigue, noting that "physical activity is associated with improved affective experience and enhanced cognitive processing."
5. Drawing and Photography
Jeff Koons, an American artist focusing on creating art based on objects associated with popular culture, notes: "If I try to articulate every little detail in a drawing, it would be like missing the forest for the trees, so it's just about getting the outline of the forest."

Getting involved in the fine arts is a great way to improve your creative ability and, as Koons indicates, can assist you in seeing the larger picture. And with the rise of internet classes, drawing and photography classes have become relatively cheap. A combination of platforms such as Udemy, Skillshare and YouTube can get you pretty far.

Photography and drawing are deeply creative activities. The ability to accurately produce or frame representations of what you see can change the way you view the world. Every time artists draw a person's face or their surroundings, they are calling on the sum of their visual experience in order to synthesize certain details into a coherent drawing.
6. Do Nothing at All
The best-selling author Alan Cohen once wrote: "There is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither." Sometimes your mind just needs to unplug from processing and skim past volumes of information in the form of internet articles and posts, text messages and other miscellaneous materials.

Processing too much information can make your mind reel and put a stop to your productivity as well as your creativity. Relaxing for a while before continuing a task can yield great dividends for your creative capacity.

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6 Proven Ways To Increase Your Creativity

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Creativity is a trait many consider to be unlearnable-they believe it arises out of innate talent or a similarly abstract aptitude. But what if I told you that there were things you could do to foster your creative side? As it turns out, creativity is more akin to a learned skill than an innate quality.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Y-T_guM1I

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Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

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Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

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'Creativity' is one of the most prestigious ideas of modern times and as a result, we often want to feel creative while lamenting that our lives don't give us sufficient opportunities to be so. But this impression may come down to an unfairly inflated and unhelpfully skewed notion of what creativity could actually involve. We are far too focused on creativity's dramatic highpoints within a narrow, cliched band of activities, like the writing of a prize-winning novel or the making a film that receives accolades at Cannes or Berlin. By this standard, almost no-one can be creative and creativity must remain an elite and even freakish anomaly entirely disconnected from ordinary life.

Pablo Picasso, Tête de taureau (Bull's Head), 1942

In 1942, Pablo Picasso dismantled an old bicycle and attached the handlebars to the seat to bring out the resemblance to the head of a bull. It's hard not to be a bit charmed. It is a move that helpfully gives us a more accurate idea of creativity. The items Picasso used were already very familiar to everyone. The key initiative was that he rearranged them to make each part more valuable than it had been in its previous role. This act of combination tends to be central to the creative act. There is very little that is entirely new under the sun, but to be creative is to learn to see how apparently unlikely elements might fit together in a fruitful new arrangement. One might borrow a way of organising information from the world of computers and apply it to the management of a gym. One might take an idea associated with the history of Ancient Greece and set it to work within the running of a modern school. One could take a way of speaking popular in Japan and collide it with contemporary English diction.

Essentially, creativity means spotting an opportunity to improve things through recombination. The German philosopher Hegel put the idea in its grandest terms: we are creative, he wrote, when we 'strip the world of its stubborn foreignness and adapt it to our needs.' Usually, we just put up with matters that are frustrating or disappointing. But when we get creative, we adapt what is to hand - combining, reorganising, starting afresh - so that it better matches our interests and ideals. It is the opposite of feeling stuck and resigned, it is a refusal to accept the status quo. The creative person is someone particularly committed to the idea that there must be a better way of going about things.

A lot of work - paid and unpaid - is more creative than we usually suppose: when we repaint the bathroom and choose a more pleasing colour that we noticed in a book about houses in India; when we cook a meal and arrange the asparagus on a serving plate in the way they did in a film; when we introduce a set of icons in a report so that the main points come across more clearly, when we put a pot of geraniums we found in the garden center on the window sill to make a space more cheerful or introduce two friends to each other because we've realised how, despite some quite striking differences, they'll get on well. In every case, we are being creative because we are spotting an opportunity to make an improvement and increase our pleasure in life through an act of rearrangement and combination.

Creativity isn't a rare and highly dramatic activity; it's not a side-show incidental to the core concerns of our lives. It's something that - ideally - we're always involved in. It's a refusal to accept the world as it is in all its facets, it's a commitment to doing better with what we have. As creative people, we don't have to write novels, we are just persistently on the lookout for ways (sometimes very small) of improving our lives: we try being more complimentary to a tricky colleague; we experiment with different music in the car; we reorganise the cutlery drawer or get up ten minutes earlier so we can do some stretching exercises first thing. We don't see the current arrangements as fixed; we're always ambitious to fine tune, to re-arrange, to adapt, cut out and adjust in order to creatively bring a little more pleasure and coherence into our own lives and those of others.

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Why Creativity is Too Important to Be Left to Artists

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'Creativity' is one of the most prestigious ideas of modern times and as a result, we often want to feel creative while lamenting that our lives don't give us sufficient opportunities to be so.

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In a beautiful article for The Atlantic, Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity, writes:

[C]reative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way-seeing things that others cannot see. ... Having too many ideas can be dangerous. Part of what comes with seeing connections no one else sees is that not all of these connections actually exist.

The same point of view is offered by James Webb Young, who many years earlier, wrote:

An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements [and] the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships.

A lot of creative luminaries think about creativity in the same way. Steve Jobs had a lot to say about creativity.

In I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words, editor George Beahm draws on more than 30 years of media coverage of Steve Jobs in order to find Jobs' most thought-provoking insights on many aspects of life and creativity.

In one particularly notable excerpt Jobs says:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

The more you learn about, the more you can connect things. This becomes an argument for a broad-based education. In his 2005 commencement address to the class of Stanford, Jobs makes the case for learning things that, at the time, may not offer the most practical benefit. Over time, however, these things add up to give you a broader base of knowledge from which to connect ideas:

Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

While education is important for building up a repository for which you can connect things, it's not enough. You need broad life experiences as well.

I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words is full of things that will make you think.

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In a beautiful article for The Atlantic, Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity, writes: [C]reative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way-seeing things that others cannot see. ... Having too many ideas can be dangerous.

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https://www.fs.blog/2016/06/warren-berger-system-questioning/