Your Business Was Once A Spark of Creativity
If you talk to many business owners about creativity, they’ll likely deny there’s a creative aspect to their business. Are you one of them? The truth is everyone is creative. Every thought you have is created by you. Every plan you make is creativity in action. Whenever you come up with a solution to a problem or challenge, creativity is at play.
It follows if you want to increase your business or take what you have to the next level, you’re going to brainstorm, either alone or with others. What is brainstorming but creativity on steroids? You throw any and every idea on the table without judgement. In the beginning, there are no bad ideas.
Once you have a pile of ideas, you begin weeding through them to determine the ones unlikely to achieve your goals (still, no bad ideas) vs. those which will send your business in the right direction where you assume the sky is the limit even if what’s evident before you might contradict your claim.
Every Dream Fulfilled Was Once Impossible
If you’re looking at me askance right now, think about how many impossible ideas have 
become reality. The telephone. Airplanes. Rockets. The Internet. I could go on, but the truth is, someone, somewhere took an idea others deemed impossible, and made it possible. Why should you and your ideas be any different?
When I first started working in accounting, we weren’t using computers, especially in smaller companies. Instead, we sat at our big steel desks painstakingly writing numbers into gargantuan ledgers by hand. If someone had told me then I’d soon have no need of a calculator or typewriter, I’d have suggested they see a psychiatrist. Had they told me I’d be talking to people in other parts of the world via a computer that looked like nothing more than a flat-screen TV, I’d have probably laughed them out of the room before going back to writing teeny tiny numbers in my 20-pound ledger book.
Yet here we are. For the last 30 or so years, I’ve worked in offices with a PC on every desk, all connected to a central point. I’ve seen DOS and dancing green numbers on my display give way to Windows in all it’s iterations, and full-color, flat-screen monitors. I saw data that fit on a 5 1/4 inch floppy give way to smaller, denser disks with more storage capacity, zip drives, CD’s, thumb drives, and eventually external hard drives and cloud storage. Every new development made my job easier, yet more complex. The more information managers got, the more they wanted. The more I wanted.
Creative Opportunities Wherever You Look
Even while working for others, my own creativity came into play. If the program will do this, how can I make it do that? If I can get it to generate reports that compare data in one way, I should be able to get the data cut and sliced in at least 100 different ways, right? The software didn’t always agree, which led me to workarounds. I got to come up with a creative solution to achieve my own visions!
In order to accommodate people like me who never have enough, software had to get more complex which meant it required more space. Other visionaries found a way to put more information in smaller and smaller amounts of physical room. As I said earlier, the computer I have on my desk now looks like nothing more than a flat screen TV, yet it has at least 100 times the power and capacity of the Kaypro I got in the late ’80’s with it’s amber monitor, 512K of RAM and 40 MB Hard Drive.
To put that in perspective, I couldn’t run a single program I’m running now on that thing, or save a single document, much less access the internet. Back then, we went online via a 2400 baud modem. At the time, we thought it was crazy fast!
But someone decided 2400 baud was too slow, and eventually, dial-up was a dinosaur. They created new technology out of nothing but an idea, and soon, what they’d created was obsolete too.
Some people came up with ideas of their own; fresh, new, and unique. Many others piggybacked onto someone else’s idea, effectively building a better mousetrap, only to have someone (and maybe themselves) see ways to improve upon their idea.
Open Your Mind’s Eye to the Possibilities
No one knows your business better than you do. You’ve probably sprinted at times, stumbled 
and fallen at others. You know what works, and what has failed. You may have a clear vision for where you’re going to take what you’re doing in the next 5 years, or you could be stuck in a rut. Like the examples I’ve cited, even if your industry isn’t technology, what you do could become obsolete at some point if you don’t allow your creativity to come out and play; if you don’t evolve.
It doesn’t mean you have to turn your business on its ear. You don’t have to make massive changes to keep evolving. You do need to either look at things with a non-judgemental but critical eye, or bring in others who can help you get past some old habits to see possibilities. Wasn’t your business a possibility at one time? It can and will be again.
From where I sit, fear of change is the biggest dream killer. It keeps you stagnant even when you know your ideas have merit and deserve a chance. You get comfortable doing your thing, and myopic about how many others are out there doing something similar, but finding a way to do it better, cheaper, faster. I don’t know about you, but given the option, I want to be the one to take what I do to the next level. I want to continue to be the innovator rather than another user of someone else’s idea.
Look for Branches
Granted, what I do is essentially creative. But it’s as easy or easier to leave myself in the dust if I don’t focus some of my creativity on building on what I already have. How can I reach more people? Who else might need what I offer? How can I make their lives easier? What else might they want from me that leapfrogs off what I’m already offering? Most of all, what new skills do I need to acquire in order to increase and improve on my offerings?
Some of my brainstorming involves looking at what others have already done. Sometimes, I listen to training videos and do exercises to unlock the visions in my head that are bouncing around aimlessly. At some point, I start putting some of the ideas into practice to see if any of them are truly workable. Often, that means trying them in different places, with different people. One thing I’ve learned is not to count something as a failure because it didn’t work for one group or person. Sometimes, you have to float your boat in a few different bodies of water before you find the one most likely to utilize all its capabilities.
The biggest lesson I’ve taken away after watching, learning, and listening for years, and seeing how I’ve helped other peoples’ businesses grow, is to keep looking for new things to learn, and new people to learn from. The broader your perspective, the more open you’ll be to possibilities that may not be obvious. You’ll see a glimmer that might have gone unnoticed without the ability to see possibilities everywhere.
It doesn’t mean you won’t eventually be more discerning, but save it for the implementation stage. Remember, there are no bad ideas.
About the Author
Sheri Conaway is a Holistic Ghostwriter, and an advocate for cats and mental health. Sheri 
believes in the Laws of Attraction, but only if you are a participant rather than just an observer. Her mission is to Make Vulnerable Beautiful and help entrepreneurs touch the souls of their readers and clients so they can increase their impact and their income. If you’d like to have her write for you, please visit her Hire Me page for more information. You can also find her on Facebook Sheri Levenstein-Conaway Author. And check out her new group, Putting Your Whole Heart Forward.
Be sure to watch this space for news of the upcoming releases of ” Rebuilding After Suicide” and “Sasha’s Journey”.
