Creative. Pauses.

In the midst of your hectic days and over-scheduled calendar of Zoom meetings, don’t forget to take a moment to pause and simply give yourself time to think. Sure, it’s awesome if you can block out an hour or even an afternoon to think up creative ideas for your business and your life — but we’re all doing more with less these days and it’s tough enough to keep your calendar up to date and stay on schedule to begin with, let alone trying to schedule something as ethereal as “creative thinking”.

It only take a few seconds to be creative

While it may take weeks, years, or a lifetime to effectively put an idea into action and see it grow into its full potential, it really only takes a moment to think and be creative.

While you’re listening to a client’s voice mail message and you are waiting for the tone so you can leave your recording, you have a window of a few seconds to think creatively.

• What can you say to make your client smile when they hear your message?
• What message would get them to immediately call you back?
• Is there a message you could leave that is SO good that they’ll save it and share it with friends?

When you’re sitting in traffic and you’re thinking up alternate routes to take in order to avoid the logjam of vehicles — you’re being creative.

A man was driving during a light rain and was annoyed by the constant back-and-forth of his windshield wipers. There wasn’t enough rain to need the repeated motion of the wipers, but it was raining just enough that he needed the wipers to clear his view occasionally.

Rather than just suffering through it and turning his wipers on and off over and over again like everyone else, he started wondering why his windshield wipers could work like the human eyelid — only blinking and clearing the lens of the eye when it was needed.

In that moment, Robert Kearns came up with the idea for the intermittent windshield wiper, a standard feature on just about every vehicle in production these days.

Granted, it took a little while longer to create the prototype, and a lifetime to get the reward and recognition he deserved as the inventor of the device, but it took just a moment to think about solving the problem in a creative way and generate that Flash of Genius.