The Sparks of Genius Challenge

Welcome to the Sparks of Genius Challenge, an ongoing series of posts that will provide concrete suggestions for exercising imagination and developing creative capacity.

Have you heard about the 64 Million Artists Project launched in Great Britain? It’s got us thinking of a similar project that we’re launching from this blog.

We recently learned of the 64 Million Artists Project from a creativity scholar who is keen on revitalizing personal relationship with the arts and philosophies of meaning-making. The idea is to encourage everyone, young and old alike, to get in touch with their artistic side. And to re-engage with wonder, awareness, and the “enchantments” of paying attention to the world around us, in us.

It doesn’t matter who you are, or how old you are, or how much time you have to play, or whether you’ve actually ever made anything before. The very act of taking 20 minutes a day or an hour a week or a half a day per month to make, draw, photograph, sculpt, compose, perform, build or otherwise create something is enough. Enough to bring out the inner artist that resides within us all.

What a simple, yet powerful concept! To exercise imaginative muscle you must take on imaginative challenge. To nurture professional creativity you must build on personal creativity. To prepare tomorrow’s innovative leaders you must encourage today’s inspired amateurs. We’ve said as much in numerous posts over the past years on amateurism, recreation, playful learning, hobbies, everyday creativity, inner beginners and more.

The Swiss Army Knife of Thinking Tools.

Source: Robert Root-Bernstein

It’s time to trade talk for action—and our best advice: “Just do it”. To make an easy start of it, the 64 Million Artists Project provides inspirational suggestions and art prompts for those who visit its site. We’ll do the same here, only our challenges will exercise and improve your capacity to think imaginatively with one of the 13 thinking tools identified in our book, Sparks of Genius. These are the tools:

Observing

Imaging

Abstracting

Recognizing Patterns

Forming Patterns

Analogizing

Empathizing

Body Thinking

Dimensional Thinking

Modelling

Playing

Transforming

Synthesizing

Each month for the coming year we’ll take on a different thinking tool. Every other week, we’ll offer a range of challenges meant to exercise that tool and enhance your capacity for using it in real life situations that come your way. Some of the challenges will suit beginners; some will suit more expert imaginators. They won’t suppose how you might use that tool in your own creative life. They will, however, encourage you to think of that creative life broadly.

It’s our purpose to open you up to the possibility that playing around with an art might help your science, or vice versa. It’s our goal to convince you that the backyard naturalist might feed the dancer or the lawyer as much as the painter feeds the writer or the musician the doctor.

So welcome to the Sparks of Genius Challenge: One tool and one month at a time, give some or all the exercises a try. For 20 minutes a day, an hour a week, a half-day a month. Build imaginative muscle. Explore and expand creative capacities. Be your own best example that imaginative practice begets creative growth and capability.

Start here!

© 2015 Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein