You will only have good ideas if you value ideas. Otherwise you’ll drift through life living off other people’s ideas.

Creative thinkers: (1) Explore every option. Exploring a multitude of possibilities helps to stimulate your imagination, and imagination is crucial to creativity. Albert Einstein said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ Why? Because it looks for new ways to put your knowledge to work.

(2) Embrace ambiguity. Creative people don’t feel the need to stamp out uncertainty. They see all kinds of inconsistencies and gaps in life, and they take delight in exploring those gaps or using their imagination to fill them in. When you find an unmet need, you can either conclude that nothing can be done about it, or pray and look for a way to meet that need (see Philippians 4:19).

Creative thinkers also: (3) Celebrate the offbeat. Creativity explores off the beaten path. Kingman Brewster, former president of Yale University, said, ‘There’s a correlation between the creative and the screwball. So we must suffer the screwball gladly.’ To foster creativity, you must be willing to tolerate originality and oddness.

(4) Are not afraid of failure. American philosopher Charles Frankel said, ‘Anxiety is the essential condition of intellectual and artistic creation.’ Creativity requires a willingness to look stupid.

It means going out on a limb knowing that limbs often break. Creative people know these things and still keep searching for new ideas. They refuse to let the ideas that don’t work prevent them from coming up with ones that do.

This is our ‘Word for Today‘.