Stirring the Still Waters: Rediscovering Creativity for a Fuller Life

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Article contributed by: Susan Peterson

Stirring the Still Waters: Rediscovering Creativity for a Fuller Life

In the messy intersections between deadlines, routine, and a phone that won’t stop pinging, your creativity can go eerily quiet. It doesn’t announce its exit. One day you’re full of ideas for your work presentation or your weekend art project, and the next, everything feels like a rerun. It’s not laziness. It’s not a lack of ambition. It’s just that sometimes the mind—the wildly imaginative part of you that makes life richer and work more meaningful—needs a defibrillator. So let’s talk about how you wake it back up.

Let Boredom Do Its Job

You’ve probably been trained, like most of us, to outrun boredom with a scroll, a swipe, a snack. But boredom is where the good stuff brews. When you let yourself be still—no podcast, no playlist, no background noise—you start to notice the quieter thoughts. Those half-baked ideas you shelved, the random image that doesn’t make sense until you doodle it, the question you never quite answered. Boredom makes space. And in that space, curiosity starts sneaking back in.

Reclaim the Lost Art of Daydreaming

Remember zoning out during math class and designing your dream treehouse instead? That was a creative goldmine. As an adult, you need to give yourself permission to mentally wander again. Try letting your thoughts meander during a walk without a destination, or during a shower when the water drowns out the world’s noise. That spacey, unfocused mental state is actually a productivity powerhouse for the kind of ideas that don’t respond to bullet points or timers. Creativity doesn’t knock; it floats in when you’re not looking.

Switch the Medium, Not the Message

Sometimes you burn out on your primary creative outlet not because you’ve got nothing left, but because you’ve boxed yourself in. If you’re a writer, try sketching. If you’re a coder, try building something physical. The shift forces your brain to approach the same instincts in a totally different language. You might find that drawing a comic strip about your marketing pitch gets you to the heart of your idea faster than another slide deck ever could. Translation, not transformation, is the goal.

Pivot Paths Can Reignite the Spark

Sometimes the most powerful way to jolt your creativity awake is to change the entire environment where it lives. Shifting careers isn’t about abandoning your past—it’s about redirecting your energy toward something that challenges you in fresh, unpredictable ways. Earning a degree through an online program makes it easy to balance full-time work while continuing your education. And by pursuing an IT degree, you can build practical, career-relevant skills in information technology, opening doors to fields that thrive on innovation and constant reinvention. Explore programs for more information.

Start Terribly on Purpose

One of the ugliest creative myths out there is that ideas should arrive perfect and ready to perform. But most of your best work begins as a deeply unimpressive first draft. So here’s a trick: start badly. Intentionally write the worst paragraph. Sketch the clumsiest character. Make the most awkward opening line for your speech. Once the pressure to be good is off, the real ideas start trickling in, unafraid of critique because they were never pretending to be polished in the first place.

Steal Like You Actually Mean It

You don’t need to reinvent everything. In fact, too much originality can be paralyzing. Try copying—not plagiarizing, but mimicking—your favorite artists, writers, or thinkers. Trace the lines of someone else's creative process to see how it feels in your hand. You’ll stumble into your own voice accidentally, through contrast and conflict. And don’t be surprised if what starts as imitation veers off wildly into uncharted territory halfway through. That’s your creativity stretching its legs again.

Change Your Inputs, Change Your Outputs

If you’re only ever reading tech blogs, your ideas are going to start sounding like tech blogs. Feed your mind something different: poetry, architecture, international street food culture. Go to a jazz club, even if you think you hate jazz. When you shake up the materials you give your brain, it starts making weird, beautiful connections you never would’ve engineered. Innovation isn’t just invention—it’s often a remix of things that weren’t meant to meet.

Make a Ritual of Starting, Not Finishing

Our culture obsesses over finished products: the novel, the startup, the final presentation. But the magic is often in the opening act—the first sentence, the blank page, the spark. So, build a ritual around the beginning. Light a candle, play one specific song, sip a particular tea. Teach your body and brain that this is the moment we try. Finishing will come later. Or not. The act of beginning is often enough to bring you back to life.

It’s tempting to file creativity under “extra,” like something you’ll get back to when life settles down. But the truth is, creativity is what helps you reimagine your career, heal your relationships, and invent a future worth living in. It’s how you make decisions when the rulebook is useless. And like anything alive, it needs attention. It needs a mess. It needs laughter, failure, risk, and play. So if you’ve lost touch with that part of yourself, don’t wait for the perfect moment. Crack it open now. You might be surprised at what comes pouring out.

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