10 Tips to Become a Successful Creative

Take practical steps to incorporate good habits into your creative routine and unlock the secret to motivation

For the past seven years, creative leadership and performance coach Jeff Fajans (@jeff_fajans) has focused his doctoral research on discovering the keys to unlocking high levels of creativity and innovation, examining the findings of leading figures in positive psychology.

After coaching hundreds of clients seeking to empower their creative processes, he has identified ten essential tips to incorporate into your creative routine to help you become a successful creative.

Ready to get started? Try incorporating these good habits to improve your productivity and unleash your inner genius.

Jeff's main objective is to demonstrate that—with a personalized work plan—it is possible to achieve your creative goals, by building habits and work systems into your daily routine.

Understand how your creativity works

Rather than waiting for a bolt of inspiration to strike to create something original, useful, or unique, you can exercise your creative muscles on daily basis. This is what people working in creative industries do, setting out to understand how new ideas work and to nurture them.

1. Fan your creative flame through genuine interest

"The spark of the genius’s creative fire is simply being interested in something. Really interested in something," explains Jeff. Creative geniuses embrace their genuine curiosities, understanding that this deep interest will give them the motivation to persevere through and tackle the inevitable challenges that await them in the future.

What gets you excited? What would you like to learn? The answers to these questions will lay the foundation for you to begin igniting your inner fire.

2. Embrace your paradoxes and complexities

According to the performance expert, it's inaccurate to say that geniuses have only one personality type. As Jeff explains, creative geniuses often have paradoxical personalities: "instead of being one way or the other, these creative geniuses bring together and express the entire range of traits possible within the human experience." While this may mean they find themselves misunderstood at times, it also means they benefit from rich insight and experiences.

"Embracing a complex and paradoxical personality does not mean being ambivalent. Rather, it means having the ability to move from one extreme to the other as the situation requires to achieve goals," he concludes. It's a quality related to flexibility and versatility.

3. Use your energy as if it had an on-off switch

Creative geniuses can channel large amounts of energy and concentration into long and intense work sessions. However, Jeff assures us, this does not mean that they are always switched on.

As he describes it, "In their routine, the creative genius balances long periods of focused attention towards his or her work with longer than normal rest periods. They exhibit a high degree of self-awareness when it comes to their energy levels, turning themselves off to recharge their creative juices."

Learning to rest means learning to disconnect—even from ourselves, our passions, and our concerns.

4. Look at the world through the eyes of an expert... and a beginner

"To think like a creative genius, it helps to be intelligent. But the relationship between intelligence and creativity is weaker than you might think," says Jeff. Research shows that higher IQ scores do not necessarily equate to higher levels of creativity. It's even possible that being extremely smart diminishes creativity.

He continues, "Goethe has said that naiveté is the most important attribute of genius." By balancing childlike curiosity and enjoyment with a wise mind, it allows you to connect seemingly unrelated elements and put them together to work toward your goals.

5. Take your work seriously, but have fun doing it!

As Jeff puts it: "Creative geniuses approach their work with a playful attitude but are able to shift gears when hardcore discipline is needed."

The generating phase of creative projects leaves a lot of room for fun, but the other side of the coin involves developing and rigorously evaluating what you've generated. You need that serious side to tighten the screws.

6. Enjoy a social life, but save room for alone time

"To be creative and become an expert, you must spend many hours practicing and developing your skills, researching, and exploring ideas—largely in isolation from the happenings of the world," Jeff reflects.

"It's just as important to know how to isolate and withdraw from the world as it is to get out into it, exchange ideas, and interact with others," he observes. Many creative geniuses intentionally alternate between solitary, inner-reflection, and intense social interaction.

7. Break out of stereotyped gender roles

"Creative geniuses to a certain extent are able to escape gender role stereotyping," Jeff highlights. Explaining this point, he notes that female creative geniuses often show more "dominance and assertiveness", while male creative geniuses show "more sensitivity and compassion" compared to other women and men, respectively.

In other words, these visionary creatives are self-confident and capable of "kicking ass" while remaining sensitive and compassionate.

"Not many people can operate with this kind of complexity," he observes, "but looking for opportunities to develop both assertiveness and compassion is something to consider when looking to boost creativity."

8. Break the rules—but learn them first

Creative geniuses are often portrayed as rebels, but they are people who have already learned the rules better than anyone else.

One well-known rule is the 10,000-hour rule that proposes the amount of time and experience required to master a skill. Creative geniuses believe in the importance of their expertise, and Jeff says, therefore remain within the realms of traditional thinking. The idea is to start innovating from that foundation of knowledge.

9. Be passionate, but objective

Without passion, we soon lose interest in challenging tasks—like spending the time necessary to develop, evaluate, and validate our ideas fully. But, without objectivity, we cannot be honest with ourselves which means we fail to detect our limitations and make the most of our strengths.

Being able to detach oneself from one's work, to critique or even tear it apart, is an essential skill regularly used by creative geniuses.

10. Make plans but don't stick to them

Creative geniuses spend a lot of time planning, reflecting, and strategizing about what to do next; however, they also have the uncanny ability to quickly throw these plans out in light of new information or more promising opportunities," explains Jeff. Successful creatives know that, no matter how much they plan, sticking rigidly to one idea can result in missed opportunities that could have been used to innovate.

This is not to say that planning is unimportant, but to remember that you never have all the information at the beginning of a creative project. We gather new information and learnings as we go, and need to be able to react and adapt based on these new findings.

What are your thoughts on these ideas? Are you curious to learn more about how to develop creative habits and apply these methods to your work? The tips were taken from Jeff Fajans' course Personal Productivity: How to Achieve Your Creative Goals. In his course, the performance and creative leadership coach teaches you how to create a system to overcome creative blocks and stay motivated by prioritizing your goals.

Illustrations by @maja_dabek ; English version by @acesarato

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