Unlocking Creativity: Using Wonder and Rigor to Transform Your Career

Natalie Nixon shares five key insights from The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation and Intuition at Work.

Are you creative? Unless you work in the arts, you may not think you are. But of course, creativity is a valuable trait in almost every field, from science and engineering to management and education. How to access and hone your own creativity is the subject of the new book The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation and Intuition at Work by Natalie Nixon. Natalie is a creativity strategist, a regular contributor to Inc. magazine and the editor of Strategic Design Thinking. Here she is to share 5 of her big ideas.

1. Toggling between wonder and rigor is a competency.

Creativity must be understood not as a rare gift possessed by an anointed, select few, but as a skill that can be cultivated and nurtured through practice. Creativity integrates wonder—the capacity to explore new possibilities through awe, dreaming, audacious curiosity, and pausing (because it is impossible to wonder when you’re going 80 mph)—and rigor—the discipline to bring these possibilities to fruition through focus, time on task, and skill mastery. Rigor is not particularly sexy and it is often a solitary venture. Wonder is found in the midst of rigor, and rigor cannot be sustained without wonder.