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    How to be Creative - A Passport to Creativity
    How to be Creative - A Passport to Creativity
    How to be Creative - A Passport to Creativity
    Ebook62 pages35 minutes

    How to be Creative - A Passport to Creativity

    By Peter Harris

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    About this ebook

    This 'passport to creativity' is a short illustrated guide to creating entirely new things, making creative improvements to anything, and solving all kinds of problems. It uses the 'IdeaTree', a five-part colour-coded diagram of process which enables all stages to be clearly visualised - and applied.

    The IdeaTree diagram is based on the process philosophy developed by Peter Harris in his MA thesis in Philosophy, 'Process and Inquiry', finished in 1995. Since then he has gone on to become the builder of Cafe Eutopia, a fantasy author, inventor, sculptor, bookbinder, etc. So, Peter knows the process of creation from the inside, as well as theoretically, and uses some examples from his life to help explain the theory.

    The IdeaTree diagram throws light on all areas of life, since life IS process. It also makes it clear just how people who specialise in the creative 'zone', can fit in with the other essential aspects of life and work, in a dynamic balance. Creative people do not have to be isolated and frustrated! They have an essential place in the cycle of growth of any group, society, business, or nation. Now more than ever, as our global economy becomes more and more dynamic and fast-evolving, the creative zone is in hot demand. Yet there is still fear and suspicion of creativity and the people who go in for it.

    This book aims to help change that by showing that creativity is an essential aspect of all life, yet it does not exist in mysterious isolation, but is simply the second of the four phases of all process: Input, Novelty, Reaction and Output.(The fifth part of the IdeaTree diagram is the 'Status Quo', made up of all the successful cycles of creation which have happened already. The Status Quo 'feeds' the process, while the new cycles are emerging.)

    These big concepts are distilled into this clear little book, making a deceptively simple tool for revolutionising the way we think - and create.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPeter Harris
    Release dateApr 9, 2012
    ISBN9780958294553
    How to be Creative - A Passport to Creativity
    Author

    Peter Harris

    I am sometimes known (by those who approve of wizards) as The Wizard of Eutopia. I live in The Story Ark, an old army barracks on the main road of Kaiwaka, 'The Little Town of Lights' - blink and you miss it, only at night you can't because it has fairy lights everywhere. For twelve years I've been building, also on the main road (well, a little to one side of it), a sculptured ferrocement 'folly' called Café Eutopia. What is Eutopia and why should you care? Well, it's an organic café, a temple to Love Beauty Truth and Freedom, and a bookshop - not necessarily in that order. See photos. For lots more, taken by tourists from all over the world, just enter 'Cafe Eutopia' in Google images. The tourists love me; the locals keep asking, 'When's he going to finish the darned thing?' Unbeknown to them, for even more than those twelve years I've also been building a much more ambitious, unseen 'folly' - a fantasy epic named (in a dream after I failed to come up with a title) THE APPLES OF AEDEN. I've also written a few other books, as you can see - fiction, non-fiction and some in between. To release the writing from the computer screen (and beat the gatekeepers of traditional publishing)I started a digital printshop and developed a quick method of book-binding, and more recently, embossing and 'edge-carving' antique-fantasy-style books (and, at the other end of the book spectrum, ebook uploading). I spent much of my earlier life, like many of us in the troubled 'post-everything' West, in an angsty quest for Truth (between enterprises intended to feed us but always threatening to consume us - spinning wheels, clocks, oval picture frames). A teen convert to radical Christianity, I thought I should become a Bible translator, so I got a BA in classical Hebrew and Greek. But in the process I 'lost my faith' (quite rationally I think!)and became an angsty agnostic. To feed a growing family, I tried to focus on the oval frames and sacrificed a few tormented years on the anvil of manufacturing, much of it in a cold, dickensian defunct woollen mills in Dunedin. Upon reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I had an epiphany which saved our business. But in 1990, just when we had paid off my father-in-law and even started to make some money, the rubberband of my soul (I felt) was stretched to breaking point, and I had to leave the workshops of the North where we had moved, and go to the City to study ...

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      Book preview

      How to be Creative - A Passport to Creativity - Peter Harris

      HOW TO BE CREATIVE

      - A

      PASSPORT TO

      Creativity

      The Beauty of New Ideas

      Book Two of the

      IdeaTree Seed Series

      by Peter Harris

      Copyright © Peter Harris August 2011

      Illustrations, cover by Peter Harris © 2011, 2012

      Second Edition April 2012

      Additions August 2012

      New cover and endmatter 07 01 14

      Smashwords edition

      Published by

      Eutopia Press

      tmp_b6fd8306119b436a1dbb17b95081cebb_6P4e6v_html_8a403b0.jpg

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      A Declaration of creativity

      The Creative Universal Flux

      The co-operative, interrelated nature of Creativity - and all four phases.

      Be happy - Whatever your Home Zone, You are Needed!

      The First Phase Of Creativity: Openness (Blue Zone)

      Before you start creating – the inevitable ‘But is this really the time for it?’ objection.

      The ‘But we can’t afford it’ objection.

      The Power Of Not Knowing

      The power of Presuppositions, Assumptions and Rules

      How to unblinker our perceptions

      Mental exercises to ‘unjam’

      Get out of the verbal bubble!

      Look for ‘bad’ facts too

      The Second Phase – The Green Zone Of The Green Zone

      The flash of inspiration – relax and let it come!

      Suspending disbelief in Spirit, the Higher Mind

      The power of ‘Faith’ – the inventor must BELIEVE a Solution IS Out There!

      The power of Never Reasoning from the Past

      (How to Refute the Fallacy of Induction once and for all)

      No Place Like Home Zone, so enjoy your ‘babies’ before they leave

      The inevitable ‘But How’ objections

      The Third Phase – The Yellow Zone Of Creativity – Critique, Choosing, Planning

      Friendly Green-zone critique first!

      Boldly winnowing the Good to get to the Great

      Being a Yellow-zone Creator – creativity by

      simply combining.

      One problem plus one problem equals two solutions. An example of simple recombination.

      Google it, Stupid!

      The Fourth Phase – The Red Phase Of Creativity

      The (rapid, ‘quick and dirty’) working prototype.

      Plan B, and C… and D

      ‘Back of the envelope’ – Kitchen table’ - RAPID prototyping -‘Fail Forward – Fast.’

      Red Phase Of Your Reading This Book

      Suggested headings for applying it.

      REFERENCES and recommended books on creativity and process

      Related Eutopian products

      Introduction

      This little book is your Passport to the Green Zone, the Dreaming and Creativity Zone of process.

      First, a bit of philosophy - don’t worry, it’s all simple to apply, and the one diagram of all process, the IdeaTree diagram, shows it all clearly, so you can apply the four-phase process concept in the same way to any problem or issue.

      Here goes (skipping detailed arguments for what I am asserting. This is a ‘suck it and see’ book! So:

      Everything is process; even a rock slowly changes.

      But only living things evolve, develop, reverse the general law of entropy which says that things left to themselves become more and more chaotic, less and less ordered, like a rock slowly disintegrating or an egg breaking.

      Is there a simple general pattern to this evolving of

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