On the path
of Winners
By Bayo
Ogunmupe
Let
Creativity work for you
To stay peerless you, must
have your next idea waiting in the wings. That is why you have to cultivate
creativity to remain relevant to your people and the world. Thus, in order to
become a genius, you must be on the lookout for creative ideas. You don’t have
to be a journalist to value creativity. Moser Wellman, in her book, the Five
Faces of Genius, avers-“The most valuable resource you bring to your work is
creativity”. Thus, creativity is the greatest gift you can gain no matter what
you do for a living.
Furthermore,
Moser Wellman observes that highly creative people are dedicated to ideas. They
don’t rely on their talent alone, they rely on their discipline. Also,
imagination is second nature to them. Also, creative people explore options.
Exploration of options helps stimulate the imagination. As Albert Einstein put
it “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Besides, options provide the
key to finding the best solution to a problem pondering a problem for hours
enables you to figure the best solution. It is a foolish man that is always
sure which is why geniuses embrace ambiguity. Geniuses don’t see the need to
stamp out uncertainty. The creative leader fends off the beaten track,
exploring actions which go against the grain in order to obtain solutions.
Thus, in order to foster creativity you must tolerate oddities. Creativity is
expressed in the penchant for making connections, associations or expressing
ideas in new ways. By such deductions, police unravel crimes and felonies.
Moreover, creative people do not fear failure. No matter what you are now,
creativity will add value to your life.
One, it can
improve the quality of your present life. Being creative is being able to do
what nobody else has thought and done. Just recently a Nigerian, Mister Adesoye
entered the Guinness Book of World Records for inventing the largest Ludo Board
ever. He is the first Nigerian to enter the Guinness Book of World Records.
Ludo has been in existence for centuries but no one before him thought of
inventing a bigger board for it.
Two,
imaginative thinking quadruples, so, diligently pursue your ambition to become
a leader. Following the prediction by Nostradamus (1503-1566) which foretold the
September eleven terror attack on the USA, I vowed from that day to use the
rest of my days writing
On September 11, 2001, I watched live on CNN in Newswatch
newsroom, how the prediction Nostradamus made in his book, Centuries in 1555
came true in 2001, that is 546 years after. That brought home to me the
enormous power of creative imagination.
Since then I
have been writing and reading. Hence I have found that imaginative thinking,
more than any other genre of thinking builds on itself and increases the
creative imagination of the thinker. The more you use your creative impulse,
the more you have. That is why you should nurture your creativity, three,
creative thinking draws people to you and your ideas. Creativity is
intelligence having fun. People are fascinated by intelligence and are always
attracted to fun. So, cultivate creativity so that you can attract great
people.
Four, creative
thinking enlarges your imagination, helping you to learn more. Creative people
know that we rarely if ever have all the answers to life’s problems. That
encourages us to generate new solutions. Five to think creatively, you have to
challenge the status quo. Remember the inventors of yore held no respect for
the conventions of their day. That was why they could set new standards of
creativity. You can only improve your status through new thinking. Creativity
is incompatible with the status quo, it only goes hand in hand with innovation.
But how do you
discover the joy of creative thinking? Here are points to remember in
cultivating creative thinking. There are creativity killers such as following
the rules. You cannot follow the rules and invent. You should not be afraid of
failure. Ask questions. Develop a creative environment. Focus on innovation.
Place high value on options, that means you must encourage alternative ways of
doing things. Human progress has flourished outside the rules; otherwise we
would never have developed the Internet and the computer.
If you have
been using some methods for capturing your ideas in a notebook, computer or
filing system, look through the ideas you recorded. If you haven’t been doing
that start today. That is the way to put your creative imagination into action.
Another way to trigger creativity is to go to another country to promote
creativity with their different culture and orientation, as new way of seeing
and doing things. Also read books that take you out of your area of expertise.
Our champion
today is Kemal Dervis, Turkish economist and politician who as Bulent Ecevit’s
Minister of Economic Affairs revolutionized the Turkish economy bringing it at
par with other economies of Europe. Born in January 1949 in Istanbul, Turkey to
a Turkish father and German mother, Kemal Dervis earned his bachelor (1968) and
master’s (1970) degrees in economics from the London School of economics (LSE).
He obtained his doctorate from Princeton University, U.S. in 1973.
From 1973 to
1976 he taught Economics in Turkey. He also served as adviser to Bulent Ecevit
during his premiership of Turkey. From 1976 to 1978, he was a staff of the
Department of Economics at Princeton University.
In 1977, he
joined the World Bank as Divisional chief for Industrial and Trade Strategy. He
became vice president of the World Bank for Middle East and Africa, in 2000
vice president for Poverty Reduction and Economic management. When Dervis
became Turkey’s Minister of Economic Affairs in 2001, his country was facing
its worst economic crisis in decades, Kemal Dervis used the support of domestic
reformers to push through a stabilization programme with far-reaching changes,
sweeping bank reforms that catapulted Turkey into a modern economy. With a
reputation for efficiency, good contacts in the U.S and Europe, Dervis was able
to mobilize $20 billion in loans which engendered rapid economic growth with
inflation coming down from 70 percent from the 1990s to 12percent in 2003. Then
the Turkish lira stabilized. He resigned as minister to become a member of
Parliament for the opposition Republican Peoples Party in 2003.
However in May
2005, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously confirmed Dervis as the
Administrator of the UNDP. He declined to service a second term of four years
in 2009. He was ranked 67th in the Top 100 World Intellectual Poll.
He is currently Vice President and Director of the Global Economy at the
Brookings Institution, Washington, USA. He is married to his second wife
Catherine Dervis, an American citizen. Also he is the author of Recovery from
Crisis, published in 2006.
