The human spirit is remarkable and resilient.  We can survive unimaginable suffering and trauma, we can create solutions to problems that once seemed impossible, and we can have boundless compassion for others.  These, however, are not our default responses to most challenges.  

Brains Come Programmed with Negative Bias

Our brains come programmed with negative software; when we experience something, we’re more likely to notice the negative in the experience over the positive.  In fact, the amygdala of the brain devotes two-thirds of its neurons to detecting negativity.  

This tendency to notice the negative is helpful in keeping us safe, because we’re wired to look for danger. However, when our “negativity bias,” as Psychologist Rick Hanson calls it, is applied to every day experiences, it can drain life of happiness.  When the negativity bias is channeled toward relationships it can damage connection and fulfillment.  

Coronavirus and Negativity

As I have been following the Coronavirus spread across China and beyond, I’ve found myself noticing a lot of negative. And, there IS a lot of negative—the numbers of infected continue to rise as does the number of people who have died from the virus.  

In many cities schools are closed, and workplaces are not allowed to operate.  People are mandated to stay in their homes.  If residents have to go out they are required to wear masks and submit to temperature checks.  In some communities, guards won’t allow residents in or out of their housing areas without an official pass—even to grocery shop.  

In a community where residents did not have their own bathrooms, a woman reported that to use the public bathroom they had to have a pass.  As fear of the disease spreads, some people have become suspicious of their neighbors.  One person reported that their neighbor put an iron lock on the outside of their door to lock them in after they returned from a trip.  Emotions such as fear, anxiety, and frustration are high.  

Coronavirus and Creativity

One morning my mother-in-law sent me an article that was so refreshing.  A Chinese woman who was under quarantine and not allowed to leave her apartment except with a pass, wanted to buy some buns.  Since she couldn’t go out, the woman tied a box on the back of a remote-control car.  She then attached a camera to the car to help her know how to steer.  Without leaving her apartment, the woman sent the car out to buy buns.  And a few minutes later she directed the car back home and enjoyed her buns.    Video.

Rather than sitting in her home and feeling trapped, this woman chose to get through negativity with creativity.  

How to Generate Creativity During Negativity

Negativity often feels like something that is happening to us—but how we feel is always dependent on how we interpret the world around us.  One way to think about negativity is as an opportunity to be creative.  Some of the best ideas have been born out of negativity. 

Here are three ways to generate creativity during negativity.  

Fertilize Our Brains

Just as plants don’t spontaneously sprout up with no soil or water or nutrients, good ideas aren’t generated in a vacuum. Some of the most creative minds share a common habit: they read and constantly expose themselves to new ideas. These are busy people, and they still make time to fill their minds with new ideas.  

Great Minds Read

Bill Gates reads 50 books a years, Mark Zuckerberg reads a book every two weeks, Warren Buffett spends 5-6 hours a day reading newspapers and corporate reports, and Arthur Blank, a cofounder of Home Depot, reads for two hours a day.  

Books aren’t the only way to fill your mind with ideas—podcasts are free and full of information.  We also have online news, movies, conversations with others, traveling, and many other ways to help us fertilize our brains.   As problems arise and you find yourself in negative situations, you then have a reservoir of ideas to draw upon.  

Combine Ideas

Once we have lots of ideas in our minds—we can mix them in order to come up with solutions to problems.  Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California at Davis suggests that genius is simply combining ideas.  

Movable Type Printing

Before the printing press was invented, people had to hand-write documents.  This meant hours upon hours of laborious copying of texts onto parchment or other materials that would rot overt time and had to be re-copied.  In 1448, Johannes Gutenberg decided to use creativity to solve this problem.  He combined the mechanisms of wine pressing and the process of punching coins to create movable type printing.  This process was used, almost unchanged, for five centuries.

Gutenberg took two separate ideas and mixed them to create something new that solved an important problem. Combining ideas can be as simple as looking at a problem and asking ourselves how we could use two unrelated things to solve the problem.  

Mixing Ideas Can Be Simple

For example, several years ago I absolutely dreaded our family’s dinner time.  It seemed that everyone was tired and our kids would end up arguing and fighting.  At around the same time, I had been trying to think about a way to teach my children about several different things I thought would be important for them to learn. So, I took these two situations and combined them to create a new pattern in our family.  We started having daily dinner topics that helped our family stay engaged around the table.  On “World Wednesday” we learn about current events in another place in the world, and on “Thought Thursday” we talk about healthy emotional skills.  These dinner conversations have become a staple in our family and have made dinner time something we all look forward to instead of dread.  

Create the Idea

A creative idea itself can bring hope during negativity!  However, creativity can also be discouraging if we only think about big ideas and don’t follow through with actually creating them.  Bringing our idea to life—experimenting with it, sharing it, and applying it, is where the magic of creativity is found.  

This is the step where we can easily be sidelined by our own negative self-talk or even fear.  It’s normal to be uncertain about if an idea will work, or what others may say—especially if it hasn’t been created before.  Sylvia Plath famously wrote, “the worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt.”  

The Junk Orchestra

About ten years ago, a young environmental engineer named Favio Chavez arrived in the small town of Cateura, Paraguay. In the poor city, which is located next to a large landfill, most families survived by scavenging trash and many of the youth were addicted to drugs.  Chavez decided he would teach music to some of the kids in his free time. Once he ran out of donated instruments, he decided to take his love of music, his background in engineering, and his desire to improve the earth and the community around him, and created a novel idea: a “junk orchestra.”  

Chavez asked a local carpenter to make instruments—out of garbage.  Together, they made violins out of cans, wooden spoons, and bent forks. They created a cello using oil drums, old cooking utensils, and worn out shoes.  They even made a saxophone out of a drainpipe, melted copper coins, spoon handles, and bottle caps.  

Many people doubted Chavez and said it wouldn’t work.  The idea seemed crazy.  Over time, however, the orchestra achieved not only local recognition, but international acclaim, especially after a filmmaker documented the orchestra’s journey.  

What began as a combination of a few ideas became something that has brought enough money to a small town to build better homes, give the children self-respect, and provide hope to a community that didn’t have it before.  

The Courage to Share New Ideas

For most of us, bringing ideas to life require much less effort than what Favio Chavez did—it simply means having the courage to share our ideas, or apply something new we learned or try something new.  As we do, momentum grows and the creative process brings new ideas and additional creativity to the problem.   

Creativity is Powerful

Creativity is powerful.  It will lift us out of negativity if we are willing to stock our minds with new ideas, combine them to solve problems, and have the courage to bring our ideas to life. 

Get Out of Negativity with Creativity

1. Fertilize your mind with new ideas
2. Combine ideas to solve problems
3. Take steps to actually create the idea