I'm not even completely sure what laziness is, but I've got it. Blame the winter. Blame the 50,000 words I wrote in November as part of NaNoWrimo. Blame my old and aching back. Whatever... it's laziness.
Every night, I meditate on a day spent re-reading familiar books and avoiding the laundry problem. I find myself responding, rather than initiating contacts. I assure you I am not depressed; I'm just lazy!
What's the cause? Well, probably the winter is part of it; I'm not getting much exercise now that jogging season is over, and that means I'm low-energy. But really, I think I've hit a fear point in my bigger projects. The holidays came at just the right time for me to form a thousand excuses not to confront my fear of taking the next step. Between entertaining the family and consuming upwards of a million Christmas cookies, I've been distracted enough to avoid my creativity anxiety.
The answer, my friends, is simple: laugh at my own foolishness and dive right back in. What is there to be afraid of? Failure? You only fail if you don't finish! Set a schedule and let my family know about it, so that they can help give me that oh-so-gentle push.
I only have one life, and within that life, all I have is each new day. The sun is up, and it's time to get back to my life!
Curiosity, not necessity, is the mother of invention! Your creative brain reaches out into the world, sees something that surprises it, and that kick-starts the creative process. 
As we get older, we learn to screen out surprises and focus on the patterns that help us to succeed at basic tasks. That's very practical--and awful for our creativity. So here are a few ways you can get your curiosity up and running again.
1. Find three things to ask "why" about, every day. Remember how you drove the grownups crazy with this question, way back when? Drive yourself crazy with it, and you'll regain some of that childhood wonder.
2. Use more of your senses to observe the world. If you're a primarily visual person, use your ears. If you're a primarily auditory person, use your nose. You get the idea. By bringing new information to your brain, you will automatically stimulate its curiosity.
3. Take your head out of the google-verse and start learning from your own experience. Doing it yourself means no more fast answers; instead, you'll have to live with ambiguity. Since ambiguity can be frustrating, that puts your curiosity in the driver's seat.
4. Ask other people what they think about the world. You may be surprised at the diversity of opinion around you. If so, you will become more curious about your options and the way different people think.
5. Change a habit. If you always take the same way to work, choose a different route. Be curious about it. If you always eat the same kind of food, try a different kind. Be curious about that! The point is to change something and let that stimulate your curiosity.
6. Learn something new. This is just plain good for your brain and your personality. Take up the guitar, and then get curious about the history of guitars and guitar music. Study a language, and then get curious about the history of its native speakers. Learning is fun, it makes you smarter, and it kick-starts your creative brain.
Have you ever spent a couple of hours (watching TV, say) being passively entertained, yet when it was over, you feel more bored than ever? That's because passivity and boredom are closely linked. The entertainment may have been fun while it lasted, but it doesn't satisfy your need for a vital, engaged, expressive life.
Boredom occurs when people are not challenged by their activities. A person has many facets, from talents to personality traits, and when too many of those are underused, boredom is the result. People are bored when they can't or don't intentionally change their activities to make them more challenging.
In some ways, boredom is actually a good sign; it means that you care how your time is being used. Unfortunately, it's also an uncomfortable, frustrating, and (sadly) sometimes necessary experience.
My solution to boredom is observation. Even if I can't actively engage in the activities I find most fulfilling, at any point in time I have a mind and the ability to observe the world around me. Standing in line, doing a repetitive task, politely listening to someone repeat a story I've heard a hundred times--all of these are times when I can devote a piece of my mind to observation. Even a fly on the wall is interesting if you are curious about it!
The bonus is that those observations, from time to time, lead to ideas that I can use in my creative projects. So while I haven't eliminated boring activities from my life, at least I've made boredom very rare.
Do you know why you are creative? Because the universe is! Every being, and even substance, around us is part of a vast process of creation. All of that variety, the sheer extent of the universe is proof of that.
Led by the natural processes of the universe, our brains evolved a Creativity Department because that helps us to make ourselves more successful at... being ourselves. Each of us, by becoming stronger and smarter, helps the human race to survive and thrive. In the particular case of human beings, that doesn't just mean our bodies, it means our minds and ideas. People will fight and even die for an idea; we know that our legacy isn't just locked up in our bodies.
The book The Evolving Self by Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi describes this in some detail; here, all I want to say is that your creativity is the part of you that helps you to be part of the universal process of change, experimentation, and invention. Even stars do it, so why shouldn't you?
If you need to find energy for a creative process, open your eyes, look around you, and see how extraordinarily creative your world is. From the tiniest mite to the huge stars in the sky, creation is everywhere. All you need to do is unleash your personal spark.
Both co-operation and competition are natural social impulses--just watch any group of animals; each behavior has its place. In fact, because the need to surpass a rival can be very motivating, competitive impulses are often at the root of creative behaviors.
Despite its bad reputation, competition can generate positive ideas and behaviors. For one thing, people "compete" not just with one another, but also with tired assumptions, scary forces of nature, oppressive governments, or biased beliefs.
Competition becomes destructive when it degenerates into reactions: merely repeating what the "other side" does but doing it more aggressively. Instead, use your creativity to find more effective ways to compete.
Start by going beyond "I want to win!" by defining your goal creatively. For example:
- Instead of just trying to beat the fastest runner on the team, set a goal of developing a smarter, more effective training regimen that both helps you win, and also sets you up to keep increasing your personal best over time
- If you wish you could "shout out" the old ideas that are keeping your company or community from being effective, use your creativity to find ways to engage and persuade others to discuss new ideas with you
And don't forget about co-operation: the ability to get others on your side by co-operating with them can help you to compete much more effectively.
Say you've hit an impass. You've tried everything: gone back through the creative process to fix what's wrong, stayed motivated, tapped into the expertise of others... You realize you're at the end of the road for this project.
After the time, passion, and effort you put into this, that can hurt. You may be tempted to hang on and refuse to give up, even when you know in your heart that it's all over. You also may be tempted to indulge in "sour grapes", and pretend you just don't care about it any more. But if you do either of those things, you'll be missing a valuable opportunity to learn and grow from this experience.
Instead, try the following three steps:
1) Take a short break to calm down, then go back over what worked and didn't work. What can you learn from what went wrong? What can you learn from what went well?
2) Get feedback from those you trust, just to be sure you're seeing it from other angles. Ask for positive feedback as well as their critique. You don't have to agree with them, but be open to their perspective.
3) Then, when you understand what happened, take that understanding and acknowledge it as a new strength. What can you do with what you've learned? Where could this new perspective lead you?
If you are able to get past the two traps of hanging on and throwing the good out with the bad, your experience will actually make you better at being creative. And that was worth everything you went through.
Sometimes the creative flow is high-energy, even a little manic. Other times, creativity requires a very calm, quiet mood. In that latter case, it's very important to be able to clear your mind and "listen" to quieter inner thoughts.
You will have your own ebb and flow of energy. Personally, I find that my body helps to tell me which mode I am in. If I feel energetic, I end up typing fast and furious, having lots of ideas. At other times, ideas come more slowly. Yet these slower times can produce deeper, more sustained creative insights. To take advantage of that quieter energy, I like to clear my mind and let it move at its own pace.
