This year I’m experimenting with creativity. It’s a broad field, but my goal is to personally create more and better products and ideas.<\/p>\n
One thing I realized last year was how easy it was in this world of information to sit back and just take it all in. I could spend all day reading blogs, watching YouTube videos, responding to email, checking Google News. I felt tremendously informed, and proud that I was an active searcher of information, not merely taking what television delivered. But I wasn’t creating anything myself.<\/p>\n
In trying to break that cycle, I’ve realized something: if you want to be creative, other people’s thoughts are very dangerous.<\/p>\n
Of course it’s important to listen and learn from other people. But that process doesn’t necessarily involve me creating anything new, and its addictive nature means that once I start I’m likely to continue passively receiving. So it’s important to be intentional about what information I let inform me, and when and how I do it.<\/p>\n
It’s especially dangerous to start my day with somebody else’s thoughts. If I don’t take the morning, the only untouched part of the day, for my own thoughts, then right from the start any original thoughts I might have had are changed by other people. Again, that may be a good thing eventually–but since this is the only time my totally unique thoughts exist, it’s worth preserving them that way for at least a little while.<\/p>\n
What does this mean practically? For me, it means being very careful about when I check email, news, and blogs. All these things are important. In fact, they’re important enough to consume my thinking once I interact with them.<\/p>\n
It also means especially protecting my morning. I recently saw a quote from William Blake that sounded especially wise: “Think in the morning, act in the noon, read in the evening, and sleep at night.” (In [the same article](http:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/expert\/article\/leadership\/23188) I was surprised how many business leaders let others set their agenda through email and the news, though this may be unique to CEOs as opposed to, say, chief *innovation* officers).<\/p>\n
This is getting more and more difficult. Two days ago I got a phone that can check my email and my blog reading. I could be reading email within seconds of waking up, still in bed. It takes real discipline for me to not do so, but it’s worth it. I managed to write this thought before reading any email–doubt it would exist had I logged in already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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