On the path of Winners By Bayo Ogunmupe Let Creativity work for you

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 67^th 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.