One Apple A Day #89
I’ve been thinking a lot about space, lately, and how it is essential for creativity. I’ve spent years acquiring skills and knowledge, learning tools, methodologies and strategies to improve creativity. All these things that we stuffed inside our minds have been the source of many great ideas in the past. But it looks like they are not suited to address the innovation challenges we are facing in our world Today. The more I dwell into this quest for innovation the more I understand that we don’t need more knowledge or skills. What we need is more space. We must create the free space through which our imagination and creativity can flow freely, unleashing all our innovation potential.
I’m currently reading an excellent book about the power of thinking like a toddler. Anytime I can observe young humans doing even the smallest thing I’m amazed. Their ability to approach every challenge as an opportunity and to find connections outside the realm of logic is mindblowing. So, another way to reignite our creative power is to unleash our inner toddler.
Create space and think like a toddler. I was wondering about the connections between these two way to approach creativity when I found this quote.
“While a toddler’s world might be geographically tiny, it is mentally limitless; conversely, when we grow up, we have the potential freedom to explore everything around us, but will often limit ourselves to the same narrow range of places, people and experiences.” - from Little Wins: The huge power of thinking like a toddler by Paul Lindley.
This is the connection I was looking for. The inner mind space of toddler is limitless. And this infinite space allows for the imagination of a toddler to flow freely. Our mind is cluttered with knowledge, biases, fears, rules, skills. Inside our crowded mind imagination has no free space to flow. So we had to create external systems and processes to convey our imagination somewhere. Unfortunately, our external spaces are becoming more and more crowded. The challenge we are facing is to create enough space outside and, most of all, inside to unleash our innovation potential.