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The Seven Creative Juices

By Peter Lloyd

Have you ever been involved in a creative session or an innovation initiative in which someone has not said something along the lines of "...so to get our creative juices flowing..."?

It's possible that I hear the creative juices cliché more often than I see the light bulb cliché. So I decided to do something about it. If I'm going to hear creative juices as often as I do, I want it to mean something. I mean to turn the cliché into an innovative way to think about creative motivation.

So with your permission, I introduce the Seven Creative Juices: Pride, Envy, Greed, Sloth, Gluttony, Lust, and Anger. In seven upcoming Right Brain Workouts I will go into each of them, one at a time.

First I will acknowledge their predecessors, the Seven Deadly Sins. Early theologians recognized these seven forces as deadly when followed slavishly to their extreme conclusions. No one has found happiness there.

If aligning yourself with deadly sins conflicts with your loftier motives, I ask you to at least recognize that our human drives, whether they be recognized as sins or virtues, will always be with us. I'm sure you've felt all seven of these forces at work inside you at one time or another.

So why not use them to steer you where you want to go?

Our primitive ancestors exploited natural forces like fire and water. They took mechanical advantage of the lever. They recognized and imitated the natural genius the circle and invented the wheel. Today, we make much more sophisticated machines, but in every case we harness forces like gravity, electricity, and nuclear energy. Forces that are always doing what they'll still be doing long after we're gone.

The same goes for your Creative Juices. Envy can fire your desire to perform. Pride drives personal success. Even laziness in the form of daydreaming can open the doors to your imagination.

August Friedrich von Kekulé, a professor of chemistry at Ghent University at the end of the 19th century, worked for years on elucidating the structure of the chemical compound, benzene. Finally, one night, sitting in front of his fireplace, he dreamed the solution.
I turned my chair to the fireplace and sank into a doze. Again the atoms were flitting before my eyes. Smaller groups now kept modestly in the background. My mind's eye sharpened by repeated visions of a similar sort, now distinguished larger structures of varying forms. Longer rows frequently rose together, all in movement, winding and turning like serpents; and see! What was that? One of the serpents seized its own tail and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. I came awake like a flash of lightning. This time I spent the remainder of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis.
Kekulé's ability to transform his vision of a circular serpent into a ringed chemical structure, mystical thought it may seem, remains one of the most striking illustrations of how your Creative Juices work.

In the coming weeks, I will illustrate the power of Pride as the force that gives innovators creative self-confidence. How Sloth drives inventors to invent the things that reduce hard labor, tedium, and drudgery.

Then, if I do my job right, the next time you hear, "Let's get our creative juices flowing," it will mean something.

Read all Seven Creative Juices: Pride, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Envy, Anger, and Sloth.



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