A Five-Minute Morning Ritual to Radically Boost Your Creativity
These days, there are more tips for your morning routine than there are menu items at your local diner (I'll take the artisanal, gluten-free, low-carb, egg white and seared free-range, low-sodium pomegranate frittata sandwich, please). Rituals to boost your energy, metabolic health, mindfulness, and peak performance abound, but could you also set up your day to optimize something as squishy as human creativity?
Over the last 20 years, I've spent thousands of hours researching how creativity is cultivated, unleashed, and maximized. In addition to research and interviews with legendary creators around the world, I've applied these skills in the real world - first as a professional jazz guitarist and then as a tech entrepreneur, venture capital investor, and now as an author. Just like other learnable skills, a small amount of daily practice will deliver meaningful results over time. Studying the daily creative rituals of CEO's, billionaires, celebrity entrepreneurs, and Grammy-award winning musicians, here's a five-minute training regimen that will boost your creative ability:
- The Guzzle (one minute). Just like software engineering, if you want to change the outputs, you must first change the inputs. I start each day with a one-minute drill where I soak in the creative works of others. This can involve watching interpretive dance online, listening to music, staring at a painting, or taking in some spoken word poetry. A transfer effect occurs when bathing in the genius of others, delivering a jolt of inspiration and priming the creative pump.
- The Highlight Reel (one minute). In the same format as a sports highlight reel, reflect back for 30 seconds on a time when your inventiveness was on full tilt. Maybe you cleverly solved a tough problem or discovered a better approach to replace an old system. Maybe it was that time you shined in that big sales pitch and landed the Henderson account. Replaying a time when you were in a state of creative flow helps situate your mind for a repeat performance. Next, take 30 seconds and play a future highlight reel in your mind. This film features you crushing it in a big creative way at some point in the future. The combination of a previous highlight (which demonstrates capability) combined with a future highlight (which illustrates possibility) makes a powerful imprint on your creative consciousness and helps lay the groundwork for a highly imaginative day.
- The Unrelated Problem (one minute). Grab any headline from the daily news and challenge yourself to discover six tiny ways that might help improve the situation. That gives you only 10 seconds each, so keep the ideas fast and small. This is like jumping jacks for your creativity, helping you develop both skill and confidence.
- The Time Machine (one minute). Imagine it's one year from now and you just savored a gigantic win (got a big promotion, landed a huge account, snagged a major investment, etc.) If you had to identify what role inventive thinking and creative problem solving played in your success, what percentage likely came from creativity vs. traditional "hard skills?" Imagine a quick pie-chart, coloring in the creative portion in a bright color (I'm guessing your colorful slice of pie is at least 30% of the chart). That visual anchor can serve as a powerful reminder as you move throughout your day. Spend any remaining seconds reflecting on the various creative feats that may have led to your newfound success.
- The Sprint (one minute). Now that your juices are flowing, choose any real-world opportunity or challenge you're facing right now. Aim your creative powers at anything on your mind, big or small, and challenge yourself to see how many ideas you can generate in a 60-second sprint. Let it flow in a judgement-free, stream-of-consciousness manner, shooting for small wins while ditching any worry about quality. Can you think of 10 fresh ideas? 15? 28? This rapid-fire sprint will light up your creativity like a Christmas tree, getting you ready for an especially artistic day ahead.
After this simple five minute ritual, you're ready to conquer your most pressing challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. In these uncertain, competitive, complex, and rapidly-changing times, unleashing your full creative potential can be just the edge you're looking for. If you want to perform like the legends, prepare like the legends. With just a little daily practice, your capacity to innovate will become limitless.
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