Boost your marketing creativity in one simple step

Want to maximize your creativity? Of course you do. We all want to be more creative, especially if we work in the marketing industry, where creativity is the secret sauce that helps us do better work and get better results.

Creativity is that all-important, yet somewhat elusive ingredient that we marketers can never get enough of. To prove it, search professor Google for “how to be more creative” and you’ll get 806,000,000 results, many of them articles touting all kinds of fancy methods and techniques for boosting your brainpower. Some include things like mainlining caffeine, exercising, getting more sleep, using creativity mind tricks, and wearing underwear on your head. (Okay, I just made that one up. Creativity is fun!)

Sure, sleep helps. Exercise, too. Coffee is good, if you’re into that. Creative thinking techniques can help you break free of old patterns and approach marketing problems in a fresh way. In the end, increasing your creative powers all comes down to maximizing the effectiveness of that mushy gray blob between your ears.

All 806,000,000 articles aside, in my opinion (and this is my blog post, so that’s what you’re getting), the single best thing you can do to improve your thinking is…nothing!

(Okay, meditation isn’t really “nothing,” but it did make for a decent punch line.)

If you’re in marketing or any other creative field, a regular meditation practice should be at the core of your creativity workout. Heck, if you want a healthier life, if you want to feel better, lower your stress, sleep better, increase your mental focus and clarity, and a bunch of other good things, meditation is a no-brainer. (Get it, no-brainer?)

Meditation will help you focus. It will help you stick with a problem and not get distracted. It will help you even out your mood. It will help you think straight, stay mentally sharp, and clear out the noise. Overall, it will improve the way you think and feel, and it will help you get the most out of your brain—without stimulants, external motivators, or secret Jedi mind tricks. What’s more, it’s been scientifically proven. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

If you want to learn how to meditate, there are a million places to get more information (68 million, according to Google), so I won’t go into all that here. Just remember to start small and be patient. It takes time to build the habit, but it’s totally worth it. So what are you waiting for? As that very wise marketer Nike once said, “Just do it.”