Seek Out New Ways to Arrange Reality

The value of a mind does not reside solely in the total information it stores. Indeed, knowledge can betray you if it prevents you seeing beyond its boundaries. Whatever you know is not the limit to what can be known. Think beyond the constraints of tradition to look upon all things with new eyes.

No matter the question, a thousand solutions hide just outside your ordinary thinking. Human minds cannot interpret anything without the bias of memory. Past experience constrains you to just a few of the many options for action. Tapping into creativity reduces reality to its constituent parts and imagines how else they might be combined.

When you break things down to useful principles, you become an artist. An artist is merely anyone who intentionally turns one thing into another. A splash of blue gradually resembles the unending sky around you. So many plucks of a guitar string form a rhythm and alluring melody. The earth becomes bricks, and those bricks become a home.

All forms of creation require the creator to see beyond accepted structural limits. They expand their vision to make use of reality’s emergent properties. Intellect delineates things, placing what it knows into seemingly useful categories. Creativity challenges those categories to merge unpredictably. A balanced and effective mind needs both.

To be original, you must be able to look upon a piece of reality with the eyes that were never told what to look for. By playing with things in your own way, you produce new outcomes that staying confined to known paths could never have revealed. However smart you are, you are limited if you cannot expand beyond the already known.

The experiences of your life will present new challenges with no known solutions. Creative thinkers tackle these problems head-on, knowing they possess the faculties to assess whatever new things come at them. They will be the ones who lead for others who cannot tap their creative abilities to follow.

The nature of life is such that everyone exists in a chronic state of change. If you do not always grow, you will soon begin to die. Creative growth is easy when you are young and everything is novel. There are endless new meanings for your budding mind to integrate. Without careful attention to your creative faculties, you will lose your growth with age.

Always be scanning for the opportunity to do things differently than you have done them before. Through this process, you will delay the death of your unique self. Without creativity, you will always come second to what has already been explored. As your ally, it makes the most familiar things sustainably new for as long as you shall live.