Next Wednesday, 6pm-9pm I’m giving my first seminar through Skillshare, a company that organizes classes. If you’re near Manhattan and you want to become more creative, you should come.

The class is called Systematic Creativity. When I say it teaches proven ways to increase your creativity, I mean it. It comes from one of the best courses I took at Columbia Business School by one of the top creativity researchers, who also started a successful consulting company on becoming more creative that works with many Fortune 500 companies. Several classmates called it the best class they took there.

Wednesday will cover the highlights of the class — especially

• exercises to become more creative
• demolishing creativity myths that hold people back

It will be very interactive — the best way to learn!

Anyway, here’s the link to sign up and here’s the course description:

Systematic Creativity: Learn proven methods to increase creativity and solve problems

Do you want to become more creative? But do you think you can’t, or that only geniuses can be creative? Do you think creativity can’t be understood and taught?

Ordinary people like you and me can learn to be more creative, contrary to common myths that geniuses have to be born. Recent research has proven many myths that hampered people from learning to be more creative wrong.

Many fields value creativity – for example design, product development, entrepreneurship, and general problem solving. As designers, businesspeople, and people who face problems, we want to create solutions. Yet what makes an idea, person, or process “creative” has been difficult to define or research. Romanticized media portrayals of creative sparks and so-called creative geniuses complicate understanding and being creative.

Until now. Recent research and practices have clarified our understanding and practice of creativity, which turns out more systematic than those romanticized portrayals and easier to teach and do. So far these new practices have been applied mainly in engineering and industry, but are moving toward design, product development, and even fine art and music.

This class will cover current theory in creativity. Recent research is replacing myths that discourage people from realizing their creative potential with models showing how creative people work. It turns out successful creative people work more systematically and ordinarily than most expect. These new models enable people like you and me to create work that people will see as creative and successful in any problem-solving field – product development, design, engineering, fine art, project management, and so on. The course will emphasize the value of “ordinary” thinking, domain knowledge, experience, and persistence over hope/waiting for muses to inspire, creative sparks, freedom of thought, randomness, and other techniques.

This class will also cover practice – based on research and practice showing the systematic nature of processes that produce creative results. More importantly, the course will teach several systematic processes shown likely to produce successful solutions viewed as creative — processes that also happen to be simple and often fun. Students will learn and become adept at these techniques, having more fun and success creating solutions. That others will assume their solutions result from romanticized creative sparks, perhaps concluding they are creative geniuses, will be a side benefit.

You’ll learn:

• Understanding mainstream views of creativity and originality, how they misrepresent the creative process and discourage new ideas, why they are nonetheless perpetuated, and how to avoid them.

• Simple models for creativity and the creative process that work and facility using them.

• Problems with “outside-the-box” or lateral thinking. Recognizing instead the value of effectiveness in solutions.

• Knowing where to find sources of solutions to problems requiring innovative solutions.

• Techniques to find and develop solutions more likely to be successful and viewed as creative that are easy to come up with, and more fun to implement that happen to be systematic.

• ← Model to motivate putting in the effort to get good at something
• A belief to promote integrity and authenticity →