Blog

BLOG

5 mind-blowing facts about creativity

PUBLISHED ON 30 MAY, 2019

National Creativity Day is held on May 30th and it was founded to celebrate the imaginative spirits everywhere and to encourage them to keep creating. We are celebrating it with this post.

Keep in mind that creativity shouldn’t be something you express only on the weekends or during time off – it’s a fundamental part of anyone’s professional skill set, and particularly relevant when it comes to marketing and strategy-related jobs.

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” – Albert Einstein

Why does creativity affect more than ever the business environment? Take a look at these five facts on how creativity is able to transform your habits and the way you do business. They provide insight about how tapping into the unused (Or call it wasted?) creative potential of employees can have a huge pay-off for everyone and enhance innovation and productivity.

1. Consumer’s average attention span today is 8 seconds – 1 second less than a goldfish – it has dropped 4 seconds since 2000

It may be one of the most critical reasons to encourage creativity in your business. People don’t merely want to be sold to; they want to be part of an experience and be entertained. To grab their attention, you need to be quick and do it in eight seconds or less. This is an art, and it’s not easy at all. It’s getting more burdensome to accomplish it given that distribution channels consistently expand and, in parallel, attention span shortens accordingly. This is why today’s best content creators are in such high demand. All companies need engaged, creative employees who can come up with groundbreaking ideas to reach their consumers.

2. CEOs are worried about 3 things this year, and one of them is to create new business models because of disruptive technologies

Creativity is not only related to being an artist. It is also the way how a person or company can stay up-to-date and come up with fresh ideas. Kodak. Radio Shack. Toys “R” Us. These are just a handful of companies that recently went bankrupt due to their inability to innovate prosperously. With the digital economy continuing to evolve at a breakneck pace, CEOs understandably ranked the need to create new business models as their second biggest worry for 2019.

3. Do you live up to your creative potential? 75% of people think they don’t

That’s simply way too much. Are you in the 25% (hopefully so!) or in the 75%? When people have to wake up and go to work day after day without the ability to reveal their true gifts in some way, it can change their mood and performance. Providing employees with the space to express creativity within their area of specialty can go a long way, besides allowing time to play with creative options at work.

You’ve heard, most likely, about Google’s program that serves to foster in-house innovation called the 20% project. They allow their engineers to spend 20% of their work week on projects that interest them to help tap into the many talents of its employees and give them a chance to consistently work on a personal passion – which is great for internal innovation and morale.

4. Going for a walk boosts your creativity more than you’d imagine

If you only do a single thing to ignite your inspiration, go for a walk. Studies prove that people have more creative ideas when they walk. After a 30-minute walk, your creativity is increased by an average of 60% and your creative power extends long after you have returned to your everyday activities. The fact that you don’t have to devote much attention to the effort of walking makes your mind free to wander. If you adopt walking as a habit, you’d be sharing a daily creative routine with some of the most famous creative minds such as Aristotle, Charles Dickens, Ludwig van Beethoven, Virginia Woolf and Steve Jobs.

5. Tell me how you meditate, and I will tell you if it makes you more creative

If walking is not for you, contemplate the option to meditate instead. Do all meditation practices increase creativity? Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands investigated how two types of meditation, focused-attention (for example, focusing on your breath) and open-monitoring (participants focus on both the internal and the external), affected two types of creative thinking, that is, the ability to generate new ideas and solutions to problems. In a study published in April 2012 in Frontiers in Cognition, they revealed that the participants who practiced focused-attention meditation did not show improved results in both creative tasks. However, those who practiced open-monitoring meditation did perform better at the task related to coming up with new ideas.

Lo and behold, not only does creativity lead you to innovative thinking, but it also inspires effective problem solving and fresh ideas. Would an employer disregard its clear benefits?