Please Stop Treating Creative Burnout Like Laziness (Free Membership Gift)

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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Alok Kanojia (0:33)

Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy GamerGG podcast. I'm Dr. Olu Kanodja, but you can call me Dr. K.

I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.

On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.

In this video, we're going to talk about how to become more creative on-demand. We usually think of creativity as this random flash of inspiration. But if you work in a creative field, you can't wait for the inspiration to show up. There has to be some kind of repeatable process. So today we're going to break down the science behind creativity and give you a framework you can actually use when you're feeling stuck. Deep dives and practical frameworks are the kinds of things that we love to do on memberships. And this year for World Mental Health Day, we're giving this one away for free. If you'll like it, we've got many more on our website, so you can check out the link in the description below to learn more. Let's get into it. If Dr. K can't perceive you, are you real? I don't know, man. I don't know. So welcome to other Healthy GamerGG stream. My name is Dr. Alok Kanoja. Just a reminder that nothing we discuss on stream today is intended to be taken as medical advice. Everything is for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you all have a medical concern or question, please go see a licensed professional. Today, we're going to talk about the science and spirituality, because I can't just do science, because that's no fun. The science of creativity. So today's lecture is gonna be, I hope, very useful. And here's the reason why. We wanna be creative, right? So creativity is really important. If you look at something like, if you poll CEOs, there was a poll that was done, I think, by IBM. So they asked something like 300 CEOs from Fortune 500 companies or something like that. You know, what do you think is the most important aspect of being a CEO? And 65% of people, of CEOs that were polled, said that creativity and innovation is like one of the most important things. I don't remember the precise details of the statistics. So we sort of know that, like, in the business world, right, everyone's talking about, like, innovation. And even if we look at things like, you know, in the artistic world, forget about the business world, if you're an author or a painter or something like that, creativity becomes incredibly important there. Your job is basically to be creative. But it's not just in those two realms, right? So if you're looking at your life and you are stuck in some way, if we look at the nature of stuckness, what is that? That means that you don't know how to solve a particular problem that you're facing. So creativity becomes incredibly important for self-development. Creativity is crucial. It's crucial to your professional success. It's crucial whether you're an artist or a business person, crucial to your personal development. The problem is, how do you be creative, right? How do you be creative? Do you just sit there and you go, oh, like today, I'm going to be creative. That doesn't work. If y'all listen to like podcasts and stuff related to creative pursuits or business pursuits, right? So one of the biggest challenges is that people don't know how to turn on creativity. And if we look at it historically, there's like a group of people, like if you look at like ancient Greece, I think, you know, they developed this term called genius. And this idea of genius is that creativity isn't something that you do, that it infects you. So some outside force comes into you, gives you this spurt of creativity, or this like revelation of understanding. Like there's this kind of aha moment that happens, that then leaves you, right? So like these people, I forget if it was Rome, ancient Rome or ancient Greece, but they sort of like discovered that, or they noticed, observed, that creativity is not something that can be like consistently duplicated. And at the same time, there are absolutely professions where we require consistent duplication of creativity. So today, what we're gonna do is we're actually gonna teach y'all how to consistently be creative. We're gonna break down creativity into its components because this is another great example of there is a ton of excellent research on creativity. The problem is that this research has not like, for whatever reason, it's not as sexy as dopamine, so it hasn't translated into common awareness. So we can break down creativity from a neuroscience perspective. We can look at studies on trials where people will try to foster creativity. So there's a really great group of researchers who study, these are psychologists who study creativity. And what they did is develop a paradigm to enhance creativity in their students. So we're gonna look at some of these things. We're gonna understand exactly what the components are, not exactly, but approximately what the components of creativity are from a couple of different angles. And then you can actually like implement very concrete changes to be consistently more creative in life, okay? So that's what we're gonna cover today. And I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but like we know there are things that you can do because some people out there are consistently creative, right? So you'll have people who are like successful authors. And this is the challenge, is that everyone who tries to be an author struggles with creativity, but some people in their struggles through some amount of random chance or introspection or whatever, figure out the formula, and the majority of people don't figure out the formula. So today, what we're going to do is we're going to share that formula with you so that y'all can duplicate it. The first thing to understand is that there are a couple of different kinds of creativity. If I'm over here and I'm faced with an obstacle, okay? I don't know what this extra line is that is just going to be maybe not the best. So there are two kinds of creativity. The first is kind of what we call convergent thinking, which is like, how do I bypass this problem, right? So how do I kind of go through it? And then there's something else called divergent thinking. So if we sort of think about creativity, there is this problem, which I can kind of directly solve, or maybe I don't need to solve this problem. I can go around this way and I can end up doing this, right? So the first kind of thing, I know this is going to be somewhat abstract, but we'll get through this. So what we sort of know is that like, if you're faced with a problem, you can kind of like, you know, bypass the problem, which involves a creative solution, or you can like, solve the problem. So this is the first big divergence in creativity. These two kinds of creativity are different and will teach you how to do both. So what do we need? What does research tell us that we need in order to become creative? So this is what's really interesting. There are actually like some studies that show what the requirements of creativity are. So how do we foster creativity? So the first thing is we need an apparatus for semantic manipulation. So what does this mean? So if we look at like, I want to be creative, right?