Improve your creativity and logical thinking at work with these great advise by Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs – An American tech entrepreneur, designer, and investor, and was the co-founder of Apple, the first trillion-dollar company in the world.
He was the man responsible for the personal computer revolution in the ’80s. Steve Jobs had a reputation for getting a difficult job done without any pomp and show. He liked to simplify things.
After dropping out of college, he had traveled to India seeking enlightenment and to study Zen Buddhism.
After founding the Apple company, which was the epitome of creativity, he had gained tremendous fame and fortune.
The population in the age group of 20 to 35, known as the ‘youth’, is the most promising in terms of future potential.
It has been found that the average age of Nobel Laureates at which their critical discoveries and inventions were made, was only 32. The creativity of Steve Jobs also bloomed in this period.
Steve Jobs equated creativity with social connectivity and felt that the age of 20 to 30 in the span of peak creativity.
It is the responsibility of our education system to stimulate these young brains so that they can be innovators and wealth creators.
Steve Jobs followed some amazingly simple ways to improve his creativity, which can be followed by every budding entrepreneur.
“Creativity is just connecting things.” – Steve Jobs
3 Things To Improve Your Creativity
Increases your level of creativity and uplift your mind’s ability to produce positive thoughts, and inspired version of you.
These powerful Steve Jobs ways will help you to improve your creativity and logical thinking effortlessly.
1. Walking
Just sitting in a meeting or in front of your computer screen is not going to get your creative juices flowing!
A study by Stanford University has confirmed that going for walks can improve your creativity. Physical movements help us think and Steve Jobs was famous for conducting meetings while strolling.
The average person sits between 6 to 14 hours every day. That is terrible for your health and mood which kills your creativity.
How Steve Jobs used walks to increase his creativity, is mentioned in the book “Becoming Steve Jobs”.
He often used to take brainstorming walks with his team-mates while discussing new ideas.
Fresh air and physical activity can eliminate the stress that arise while sitting in the office for longer hours.
This idea to improve your creativity has also been adopted by most tech companies, many of whom have built little roadways on their campus for walking. The staff can conduct meetings while walking from one end of the campus to another.
Organizations are constantly striving to boost creativity and they have found that employees who take part in walking meetings are more creative and engaged.
Executives who go for walks while talking about their most pressing issues and challenges, have found it to be an enriching experience.
Physical movements help us thinking creative, and walking is a great way for having creative conversation.
This brainstorming strategy helped Steve Jobs generate some of his most creative ideas.
He used to go for three 45 minutes walks per day – The first before breakfast, the second before lunch, and the third in the early evening.
How To Walk More?
You can add steps in your life with numerous ways that can help you stay active and add few bits to improve your creativity level.
- Walk with your dog
- Get a pedometer
- Go on a walk after lunch
- Walk to the bus or subway station
- Get a walking partner
- Explore different areas of your neighborhood
- Seek out interesting place to visit
- Take stairs
- Walk while brushing your teeth
- Meet your friends for walk not coffee
- Visit your co-workers
- When getting calls
2. Travel
People know Steve Jobs for his creativity, innovation, and unforgettable quotes
In the mid-70s, he dropped out of college to travel through India and it helped shape his views on creativity. While recovering from dysentery, he read Paramhansa Yogananda’s ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’.
It started his fascination with Buddhism and Eastern religion, which lasted throughout his life.
He also flirted with the idea of being a sadhu, and renounce worldly goods. These interests and mindset let to a lifelong quest to make things so obvious and simple in their design and function, that they seemed ordinary at first glance.
Steve Jobs discovered that Indians relied more on instinct than on established facts, and that was his guiding principle when he worked on the Macintosh computer, the precursor of Apple.
According to him, creativity was most vibrant when it sprang from self-belief, intuition, and spontaneity, rather than studied analysis. This is how he viewed the personal computer, and to him it was not just a functional machine, but a creative innovation.
Steve Jobs believed that making things simple is different from making things easy, and he put a great value on well-designed products.
Simplicity is the first lesson that we can take from him and also the fact that creativity is just connecting things. The perfect examples of these are iPhone and iMacs.
He felt that the reason creative people can do such innovative things is that they have varied experiences – that can come from traveling.
3. Meditation: Daily Tool To Improve Your Creativity Fast
Meditation not only reduces stress and anxiety but can used to improve your creativity.
Apart from being a pioneer in computer technology, Steve Jobs was a brain trainer as well. He, like most entrepreneurs, was a creative person and was known for his legendary ability to create innovative and ground-breaking products.
He practiced mindfulness, which is the art of being in the moment. He pioneered the art of Zen meditation, to enhance his creativity and stay calm amid tremendous challenges in his personal and professional life.
Forbes states that mindfulness exercises allow entrepreneurs to integrate personal life with business life, and create a perfect balance between the two.
Steve Jobs used to just sit and observe to see how restless his mind was. This enabled him to mentally cope with the various pressures while remaining creative and propelling his business on the fast track.
When our mind becomes calm that’s when our intuition starts to blossom. When we stay within our box, we feel safe, because we don’t know what is outside the box.
If you think someone will steal your idea, the best way to protect is to build it. If you want to stimulate a creative idea, you need to allow the existence of divergent information.
A quick jump out of the box is more useful than a lifetime of standard thinking.
What you do to improve your creativity? Share to inspire others…
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