This Week's Creativity Tip: Do it Wrong

This begins a weekly post on The Creativity Blog. My idea is simple and hardly original - to post a creativity tip each week, and see what people might do with it.

This week, I want you to think about doing it wrong. All of us have heard that dreaded phrase "You're doing it all wrong." It's one of the great creativity killers of all time. But what would happen if you really did do it ALL wrong? Treat that as your exercise this week.

That's right, paint the worst picture you could possibly paint. Write the most miserable poem. Imagine a product that was so bad people would wonder what you are thinking? Come up with a solution to a problem that is destructively wrong. You get the idea.

Here's what will likely happen - You are going to laugh a lot while you do this. But also notice how creative your mind gets trying to do it wrong. Your creative muscles will have a party with this one. You will stretch those creative gray cells every which way, and they will love it. And creativity doesn't care what it works on, it just likes to work. So while you are doing things very, very wrong, the next day, when you site down and start to approach a real project, they will be all full of themselves, and jump right in, all energized and raring to go.

I like watching kids make things. It's all wrong, but they have such fun, and encouraged in that fun, in time, some pretty cool solutions show up. Because "all wrong" is part of the path to "all right!"

Enjoy, and let me know how you decide to do it all wrong, and what you learned in the process.

Tom