In this episode I talk about the three elements you need in order to be creative. We explore intrinsic motivation, expertise, and creative thinking skills.

What You’ll Learn

* The three elements you need in order to be creative

* The three components of intrinsic motivation

* The four steps to the Creative Problem Solving process

Resources

* Amabile, T. (1998). How to kill creativity. Harvard Business Review, 76(5), 77-87.

* Pink, D. (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. New York: Riverhead Books.

Transcript

Feel like reading instead of listening? No problem, just download the free transcript (PDF) or read it below. Enjoy!

Transcript for Episode #002: 3 Elements Needed for Creativity

Amy Climer: Hey everyone welcome to episode number two. Today we’re talking about – what do you need in order to be creative. If you’ve heard me talking on Episode Zero or Episode One, you’ll know that I believe we all have incredible capacity to be creative. It’s really just a matter of tapping into it and figuring it out. You’ve also heard me talking about the importance of believing we are creative and that belief is really important but, it’s only the beginning. There are three specific elements that researchers have found are present in all creative people and that’s what we’re going to dive in to today. Most of this research is from Teresa Amabile at Harvard Business School and I’ll put the reference in the show notes for you all. By the way the show notes can be found at Climerconsulting.com/002.

Let’s talk about what’s needed for creativity. Three things Dr. Amabile has figured out. The first is intrinsic motivation, the second is expertise, and the third is creative thinking skills. We’re going to talk about each of those one at a time. We’ll break them down and dive into each one. First is intrinsic motivation. If you want to be creative that desire to be creative really needs to come from within. Intrinsic motivation is that motivation that comes from inside of you versus extrinsic motivation is when you’re motivated by something outside of yourself like money, rewards, or that you’re going to get something, if you do this you’ll get that or you’ll avoid something. The Carrot and Stick approach is extrinsic motivation. Daniel Pink has a great book called Drive where he offers a lot of information about intrinsic motivation. He says intrinsic motivation is about 3 things – autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Let’s talk about those three.

First there’s Autonomy. Autonomy is where we get some freedom and say on how things go or how we contribute when we have no control it makes it harder for us to be creative. It also means we don’t have autonomy, but we need that freedom in order to be creative, we need that autonomy.

The second thing we need is mastery. Mastery is where we’re striving to get better at something. We have an opportunity for growth. It’s sort of related to your intrinsic desire to learn, like if you’re excited about learning then that contributes to your intrinsic motivation. Let’s say for instance that I’m trying to design a new website and I want this to be the coolest most creative website ever. In the process of working on that website I’m going to get better on what I’m doing and that will help motivate me and keep me excited.