In the garden of the mind, creativity is something that needs to be tended to with constant love and care. The ability to come up with an idea out of thin air is a myth — it just never happens. The ideas come from somewhere in our minds as a mix of past experiences, opinions and all that which is creative that has been planted in the soil of our memories, dance and play and mix together. In the first part of this two part piece, we’ll explore intuition and where it stems from.

The development of your intuition can be broken down into two parts:

1. A constant longing to absorb knowledge, be it visual, audible or written. The first, for me and I’m willing to bet most of you, being the most important.
2. Asking questions and making as many marks as you can. Of these marks, it is the wrong ones you’ll learn from the most, so we can’t be afraid of doing wrong over and over – as long as we do not make the same mistake twice.

Let’s visualise our creativity and intuition as something akin to a garden or landscape. The earth is our minds and all that lays upon it are our memories. Before this land is worth roaming, we need to fill it with as much life as possible, otherwise it’ll be a rather fruitless trip. Luckily, the seeds we need are easy to find and plant.

Seeds of Creative Thinking

These seeds hide in everything around us, so make sure you see as much as possible, not letting anything get by without a second glance, under a different light and from another angle. From a poster that stops you dead in your tracks to the pattern on the sweater of the person in front of you, the seeds to your garden are every where. Try to find that something special in everything and you’ll have a beautiful garden of the mind to venture within. Every song, every book, every movie. Every vain on a leaf, every spot on an animal and every swirl of dust dancing in the wind holds something special for someone.

Every swirl of dust dancing in the wind
holds something special for someone

You may think that for you, there is nothing to be found in any of the above, but you need to always be willing to try something new. Always be searching in unlikely places, as the more you look, the easier it’ll become to find something that will work for you in everything. This is the first step to developing your intuition—before you can just get the feeling of something working, you need to have as many mental references as you possibly can. These marks are the seeds, they are what you plant in your memory, your garden, to grow into something worth visiting.

Mistakes matter

The second step, as outlined above, is about mistakes. It’s easier on you emotionally, to get something right. But to try something that might be wrong—really wrong—can be a daunting task for some of us. No one likes to be proven wrong, it means you stuffed up, something that can be made worse if it’s in front of your peers and something that could have drastic effects should a client decide you were horribly off the mark. But through making mistakes you learn and remember so vividly and quickly, rather than if you were to always be right.

You remember and learn a lot easier if something you thought to be true, something you were so sure of, is proven to be false. Knowing what is wrong, being proven wrong, understanding what is wrong with a choice you made, be it a layout, colour or font choice, helps us understand what is beautiful in our gardens. It helps give shape to that which we already know, as knowing why something is ugly helps us understand what makes the beautiful, beautiful.

There is a difference between something that
could be considered a mistake and something that
may be considered innovative

So make mistakes, but make them early. Make the big mistakes while you are in the development stage. Learn what a mistake truly is, what it looks like. Because there is a difference between something that could be considered a mistake and something that may be considered innovative. If you make them early on, you’ll have two things happen. First, you’ll be nipping any doozies in the bud, getting rid of it before it grows into something inappropriate. Secondly, you may end up with a very surprising result in one of these mistakes—it very well may be one of those innovative ideas we lust after. Half of our intuition is our mind drawing on these mistakes subconsciously. We ‘just know’ when something won’t work because we’ve tried something like it before.

Beautiful Marks

Let’s go back to our garden. After constantly absorbing and defining the beauty of as much as we can, it is now full of life. Life, which through constant questioning (practice and making mistakes), we have an understanding of. Be aware that not everything has to be beautiful. More often than not, it is easier to remember the heinous than it is the elegant. But this is good. It’s vital. You need to refer to the ugly as well as the pretty to help you gauge what is good – it gives you boundaries. You sometimes need to be stung by a thorn to know it’s sharp.

When we are at the beginning of our creative lives, we produce clumsy, obvious, cliche ridden work. But perhaps we need to get it out of our systems. Those cool, 3d beveled, filtered-to-the-knees effects seem wildly impressive at first—the are some of the earliest plants in the ground—but we grow past this and plant nicer things, don’t we? We learn that it isn’t a good thing to hide behind technological wizardry in a creative world, as it is the tools that are doing the thinking for us. It’s not for no reason that we begin to dislike this work. Our intuition learns and tells us that these frivolous dressings hold no value. Our intuition tells us that they are nothing more than weeds, creeping into the cracks in the paths of our gardens.

Our subconscious walks through
our cerebral garden of marks

Intuition is our minds way of traversing our landscape, looking for clues to solve the problems we are faced with. It happens without us realising, but that’s not to say we can’t help develop this ability, but more on that in part two. When we look at something we are creating, our subconscious walks through our cerebral garden of marks, trying to find something that fits with what’s in front of us. It looks for something similar to give rise to new ideas, while at the same time, it makes sure our solution doesn’t look the same as something already planted. It looks at everything in view to see if anything mentally available to us might help answer the current question in an original, interesting way. This is where knowing as much as you can, having a garden of diversity, can pay off in spades—you’ll find answers in the strangest of marks that are buried in the mind. And like any other garden, the more you tend to it, the more love, care and attention you give it, the more fruit you’ll be given in return.