The greatest entrepreneurs are by default creative people. To conceive of a unique business idea and build a company to fruition, requires immense creativity. An entrepreneur is someone with the foresight, imagination, and intelligence to make something amazing out of nothing. And this creativity is cultivated from certain mental habits, either intentionally developed or naturally occurring.
As an entrepreneur or freelancer yourself, creative mental habits are vital if you’re to meet with success. Just like hard work is a discipline, so is the nurturing of creativity. It needs to be harnessed, developed, cultivated, and ultimately deployed to skyrocket the success of your business venture.
Creativity not only helps you to make a lucrative business but also to find ways to outsmart your competition, even when you have less wealth or tools than they do.
So what are the creative mental habits of the most successful entrepreneurs?
Willingness to fail
The most creative and successful people have always been willing to fail, over and over again. Without an acknowledgment that their new idea, concept, or goal had a chance of completely missing the target, they would have remained in what people term as the “comfort zone”. They would have played it safe and the great innovation would have been ruled out due to fear.
Successful entrepreneurs have refused to let boundaries and restrictions curtail their ideas and creative processes. Every day, they push against resistance. And in order to reach new levels in your own career, it’s sometimes worth taking a jump into the unknown, even when failure is a possibility.
Openness to new ideas
A big aspect of creativity is about drawing connections between often disparate concepts, facts, and questions. The more open you are to new ideas, the more your mind will create connections and form completely new ways of doing things.
While you don’t need to agree with, or even like, the ideas you explore from other people and places, it’s the openness to at least listen and learn that can bring about an amazing new business idea. Openness also leads to greater emotional intelligence, which is another valuable tool in an entrepreneur’s personal arsenal. Check you are open to new ideas, each and every day.
Questioning
Along with being open to new ideas, from whatever quarter, the ability to question everything is a core feature of a creative mind. It’s easy for us to question things we disagree with or dislike. It’s much harder to question concepts, ideas, and features that we love or with which we are initially unable to find flaws. Sometimes it’s with the latter where questioning becomes even more important.
Questioning everything, even the viewpoints we take for granted within ourselves, leads to creative thinking and widening horizons. Questioning becomes habitual and suddenly we begin to find solutions and best of all, new business ideas to then develop and grow.
Observation
Successful people are always observing. They observe everything, even things unrelated to their business or narrow professional focus. By observing all things, successful entrepreneurs are able to better understand the world. They extrapolate patterns and develop ideas from seemingly unrelated and unconnected events and systems.
All this information is processed by the brain and is from which great ideas are born. As an entrepreneur, you’ll naturally be fascinated by many things, perhaps more so than most people. But you always have the ability to focus with a little more conscious intent on the things you see and experience around you.
Discovering and cultivating inner passion
Without passion, creativity is deprived of oxygen. Great entrepreneurs are both creative and passionate about what they do, and generally about the world around them. If you’re looking solely at money and wealth as a reason to start a business, you might find it difficult to ignite the creativity needed for giant steps in progress.
Entrepreneurism is all about passion. All of the successful entrepreneurs have been extremely passionate and driven about the businesses they build and the ethos behind each. Without this drive and this adherence to a cause, they would have been bereft of creative brilliance.
Actively cultivate an inner passion for what you do. Throw yourself wholeheartedly into that passion and live it one hundred percent.
Explorative play
Work, work, work, makes an entrepreneur a dull boy or girl. Great entrepreneurs know the power of play when it comes to creativity and innovation. They play around with ideas, explore concepts out of their comfort zone, and also, perhaps more importantly than anything else, they take time away to engage in fun activities.
It’s not surprising to hear about the wild adventures of some of the most famous entrepreneurs. The crazy spirit and adventurous heart of an entrepreneur often appears childlike to the observer, but this intrinsic joy is related to creativity. As any parent knows, children at play are the most creative beings around. Don’t be afraid to let your inner-child out to play.
Time alone
A now well-known concept in psychology is the notion of creative incubating. When we struggle and struggle to come up with a new idea or understanding, it’s often days later when suddenly a solution almost magically appears. Our subconscious mind continues to work on problems even when consciously we’re focusing on other things.
Time alone, in quiet solitude, to really think and reflect, is an essential aspect of creativity among great entrepreneurs. They give themselves that space to really thrash out ideas and problems, before then having eureka moments where everything then comes together.
Cultivating creative mental habits
Creativity is essential if you want to be a successful entrepreneur or business owner. Without flashes of brilliance, it’s difficult to find gaps in a market or the required leap forward in development or branding. As such, cultivating creative mental habits is vital.
And luckily, it’s not that difficult, with a bit of persistence. We all have a deep well of creativity within us. Sometimes it just needs a framework of new thinking patterns, like those mentioned above, to really bring out some fantastic new business ideas.
