Sparking Creativity

I have long dreamt of being an inventor-someone who comes up with something new, whether it is a product or a way of doing something. This is what attracted me to engineering, and I try to bring this dream into reality in every situation I can. I feel that the most difficult part of promoting change is coming up with the idea of what should be changed. The implementation can be figured out by applying principles learned in textbooks and classrooms, but the idea requires a special skill. I have worked over the past few years to hone this skill. The obvious first step is to consciously look at everything you do keeping in mind to seek opportunities for improvement.

This first step is extremely valuable for enhancing this skill, but I feel that even someone who does not aspire to invent or bring change can still benefit greatly from it. It promotes optimism and creativity, which are not to be undervalued. Instead of seeing flaws, you see possibilities for improvement. To the same effect, I think that everyone could gain from what I recently came up with as another way to change the way I see the world. This is to identify and avoid mindlessly following unnecessary conventions.

To be clear, I am not trying to be anti-conformist, and indeed I feel that the vast majority of conventions are useful (driving on the right, greeting people when you see them, etc.). However, there are a select few (only three that I have come across) that don’t exactly have reason, other than “that’s the way I’ve always done it.”

The first on my list is setting alarm clocks to be on increments of 15 minutes, or 10 minutes. Here’s a picture of some of the alarms I had set last semester:

Would waking up one minute earlier on Tuesday and Thursday or two minutes later on Monday, Wednesday and Friday really have been better? Absolutely not – I got to class on time every time, as I would have with an 8 or 9 AM alarm. On the flip side, most peoples’ daily schedule is planned by the 15 minute divisions, so when scheduling a meeting or such I follow this convention, because in that case it isn’t unnecessary and actually helps make planning easier.

The second is only having one bottle of soap to use in the shower at a time. This one is a bit tricky, because it really only applied over the summer when I had my own shower that I didn’t share with anyone. At school I haven’t done this because it would take up a shared space that someone else could use otherwise, but over the summer I had two bottles of soap in the shower. They were the exact same kind. Why did I do this? Well while there is no advantage to it, there’s also no advantage to not doing it, and that hasn’t stopped anyone. I only ever use one type of soap so I wasn’t losing out on variety, and I would get exactly the same amount of use out of those two soap bottles as I would if I used one entirely then the next.

The final is rooted in the old saying that goes something like “They put their pants on the same way as you do-one leg at a time.” I suppose for many people, putting on your pants one leg at a time is easier than doing both simultaneously. However, when I tried out the latter out of curiosity, I realized I actually found it to be quicker and no more difficult. As I said, some people may disagree, but this is just me sharing my list, I’m not forcing anyone else to do this. So anyway, now I put my pants on both legs simultaneously. This serves as a daily reminder to think unconventionally, with the added advantage of exempting me from the aforementioned saying.

So those are the unnecessary conventions I have come up with. I should probably note that sometimes I do follow them just by chance, e.g. it would be foolish to specifically ban any alarm from being set at a 15 minute interval; I just don’t automatically do it because that’s the convention. And again, I never spontaneously decide driving on the left side of the road would be a good idea; this practice only applies to the small subset of conventions mentioned.

At this point you may be wondering how this exercise has actually helped me. To answer that, I need to jump back to the original motivation. When looking for ways to spark my creativity, I noticed that, in many cases, very impactful inventions solved problems that most people never even realized were there. As a modern example, Uber has grown to a size that almost no one would have predicted by entering into a taxi market that has existed for decades. Very few people would have told you that the existing taxi service was less than ideal; it got the job done, it met its expectations and that’s just the way it was. Uber realized that, just because that’s the way it’s always been, doesn’t mean that the perfect system is in place. Their success is evidence that the existing taxi systems weren’t perfect. So, by consciously avoiding unnecessary conventions, I am training myself to pick out these things that are often overlooked simply because they are so commonplace that no one thinks twice about them.

I am certain that this simple exercise has changed the way I look at the world in general, and has helped me to come up with better ways to do day to day tasks and solve specific problems. I urge others to come up with their own, or use some of the ones I mentioned, and see if it sparks creativity; I certainly think it does.