Danny Gregory: I'm gonna teach you something incredibly useful
that you've almost certainly never been taught before.
It can change your life and it can transform your career, but
the thing is, No one ever taught it to me, and I wonder why.
I spent a lot of time in school learning to conjugate Latin
verbs, and I ground my way through trigonometry and the
the dates of medieval wars.
And I memorized the, the key exports of African
countries and the, the table of elements and the names of
all the US vice presidents.
But I never, ever studied the very thing that I've made a
living from my entire life.
As far as I can tell, there's no country on earth where they
teach the creative process in.
Not as a straight up part of the curriculum, not in elementary
school, high school, business school, not even an art school.
Rather than teach it like any other useful discipline,
we treat creativity.
Like it was some kind of weird alchemy, like it's a
God given gift, uh, a luck of the draw, but it's not.
It's a process which has basic elements that can be written on
a blackboard, just like the pha.
And these basic steps, once you understand them, can be used to
unlock creativity in any field.
Art, music, finance, medicine, sports, technology,
politics, you name it.
And it's a mystery why creativity isn't a formal part
of the basic curriculum in schools, like most essential
skills, the creative process makes theoretical sense when
it's written down, but it takes a lot of work and practice.
To put it into useful use.
Just as a music teacher can write, every good boy
does fine on the board.
It takes years for our students to actually master the violin.
And studying organic chemistry doesn't make
you a gifted surgeon.
And football coaches run drills and drills and drills to get
ready for the coming season.
And creativity works the same way.
Practice makes it.
And school is the ideal place and the perfect time to study
the basics of creativity from a young age and then
inculcate that process so that every student learns
to be a successful problem solver, but it doesn't happen.
So pay attention.
I'll take you through the basics here.
Instead, creativity has three main steps.
Let's call them ready, fire, and.
First, you have to get ready.
You have to gather your materials.
You have to reap and harvest and hunt down the
elements that are gonna go into your creative stew.
You have to embrace the riches of the universe.
You have to watch movies, you have to read books.
You have to study the masters.
You have to listen to all sorts of music.
You have to have conversations with strangers on the bus.
You have to wander and roam and explore and fill your brain
until it's groaning at the seam.
You have to develop, uh, a narrow, deep habit of open
curiosity, delving into all kinds of disciplines and
cultures for the way that they approach problems and
innovate and improvise, and cultivating an energetic,
open, absorbent mind.
That's the first part of the creative process.
And as you get ready, your subconscious mind will be
diving deep into this reservoir of inspiration, and it'll
be making connections, and it'll be putting disparate
pieces of information together in random, infinite ways.
And it'll be linking, uh, a musical theme with a
historical fact, with a snippet of a conversation
with a, a data chart and a recipe for great meatballs.
The cauldron is going on, simmer, and the ingredients
are gonna start to melt into a rich broth, and that
takes time, private time, just the reservoir of your
brain perking and bubbling.
With no adult supervision, you can't open the oven
door in the middle.
You gotta just distract your conscious mind and you
gotta let the juices flow.
No amount of straining or worrying is gonna
help this stage.
In fact, it's quite a contrary.
You gotta trust in the process.
Take a nap, play a game, stare out the window, take a shower,
floss, and suddenly, poof.
Stuff will appear.
Ideas will pop like kernels, and at the stage you'll spew
out all sorts of ideas, good ideas, but also bad ones, and
weird ones and useless ones.
You will be a well fed meadow.
Your rich soil will be like a magnet for seeds from
across the world, sprouting up flowers, and fruits and
weeds and trees in abundance.
An un manicured.
Cacophony of abundance, but that's not the end because
what appears is still raw.
It's full of potential, but it's not ready for prime time.
So next to the hardest part, you gotta polish,
you gotta prune, you gotta evaluate, you gotta execute.
And this requires a gear change in your head.
You have to switch from that wide eyed stage of readiness
and the wild energy of fir.
To a methodical, critical period in which you kind of cu the
herd down to a few solid ideas that you want to test and refine
and critique and polish into gems that can change the game.
Creativity is at its heart, a teachable learnable process.
Learn.
And apply it, and you'll be prepared for any career
path, any eventuality.
You'll write creative legal briefs.
You'll make creative contributions to your
manufacturing process.
You'll launch creative tech startups.
You'll create new recipes and symphonies and
traffic ordinances and and budget proposals.
Creativity is this essential skill, and it's never too late
to learn and to practice it to make the world a better place.
That's all there is to it.
So one.
Ready, fill your well with inspiration and let it simmer.
Two, fire, relax and let the ideas flow.
And three, aim.
Pick the potential winners and then refine that
raw or into diamonds.
It's not easy, but now you know how it's.
The idea for this video started with one of the essays
that I write every week.
I write them just to send out to people who subscribe
and they're free, and I do it for the same reason that
I make YouTube videos because I have ideas and I really
wanna share them with you.
You can get my essays too, if you'd like.
Just go to DannysEssays.com, tell me where you want to
get them, and I'll start sending them to you this week.
I hope you do.
Thanks for listening.