Dear First name / friend,

 

Today is the second of our newsletter series devoted to 5 Daily Practices for a More Creative Life.

 

 

Focusing on action— plotting— is what drives creativity in the brain.

 

⬆️ That's a loaded sentence. An empowering loaded sentence. We ascribe creativity to a slew of factors beyond our control—genius, environment, influence, education, emotional intensity, etc. All of which make it easy for us to excuse our own lack of creative effort.

 

But it's plotting, a.k.a. thinking in story, that drives creativity in the brain. Meaning we all have the ability to grow our own creativity by focusing on action. In fact, your brain evolved specifically for you to do so.

 

Your brain evolved to have two kinds of intelligence: logic and causal reasoning, a.k.a plotting.

 

Logical thinking helped our primordial ancestors identify predators; causal reasoning or storythinking helped them hatch an escape plan so that one day you would exist, open this email, and carry on your family legacy of trial-and-erroring new actions or plots.

 

In other words, your family legacy of being creative.

 

You may know plotting by another name, like imagination or hypothesis. It's your ability to speculate and ask, “why?” and “what if?”. It's your ability to create new stories, new plans, and new strategies. 

 

The more you exercise the plotting intelligence of your mind, the more you plot in your mind, the more you imagine and hold multiple narratives in mind, the more creative you become.

 

Storythinking drives creativity.

 

Last week we talked about how creative people make specific plans that propel them into specific action. Thank you for sharing your challenge responses! One word that popped up in two responses was commitment — that getting more specific helps you commit to planning or executing an idea, both in your personal life and in your business. 

 

Your challenge this week is to plot one of your specifics from last week forward… in more ways than one way.

 

Next week, the motherlode—spotting exceptional information! 
In the meantime, here's a podcast where I blank on the title of Angus's book, but share how causal reasoning helped elementary school students develop creativity and resilience in our study with schools in Worthington, Ohio.

Have a wonderful week,

Sarah