Where does creativity come from?

Neuroscientist Rex Jung defines creativity as “the process of making something both novel and useful.” Without usefulness, nothing matters. Without novelty, nobody cares.

So how do we go about finding creative ideas?

Great ideas often feel like magic. That’s because creative thoughts originate in your unconscious brain then literally burst into your consciousness, the so-called “Aha Moment”. Eureka!

But those thoughts don’t develop out of nothing. Your unfathomable supercomputer of a brain is crunching data points in the background and making unique connections, then serving them up to you. That’s the skill we humans evolved that made us so damn intelligent (well, some of us) — the ability to recognize patterns and learn from them.

I curated some of my favorite research and thinking on creativity and organized it around a simple framework you can apply to your own work habits. This isn’t about trying to take all the magic out of creativity, it’s about understanding where that magic comes from.