A Smart Advisory from Dilip Mukerjea, writing in his new book, Imagistix:

Stay Curious, Active, And Engaged

No matter your age, you can always unleash your imagination, and your sense of play, to stimulate ideas. The issue is not age, but usAGE! Stay curious, active, and engaged. Here are some suggestions to initiate and build creative momentum: 

• Keep track of your ideas at all times. 

• Pay attention to hunches. 

• Carry a notebook wherever you go, have one at the bedside and use it to capture those ideas, thoughts and hunches. 

• Pose new questions every day. An inquiring mind is a creatively active mind that enlarges the areas of its awareness. 

• Learn about things outside your specialty. Unrelated pieces of knowledge can often be brought together to solve problems or to create new products. 

• Avoid rigid set patterns for doing most things: Look for new viewing points and try new ways. Attempt to find more than one way to approach and solve a problem. 

• Be open and receptive to ideas, others’, as well as our own. 

• Pay attention to half-baked ideas and help to form them. 

• Observe your surroundings. 

• Look for similarities, differences and unique features in objects, situations, processes and ideas. 

• Form new associations. 

• Engage in hobbies that give you experiences that are different from your work. 

• Give the mind a break and stretch by doing puzzles and making things with your hands. 

• Loosen up and laugh easily. Humour relieves tension and people are more creative when they are relaxed. 

• Adopt a risk-taking attitude. Nothing is more fatal to creativity than a fear of failure.