In many ways, an entrepreneur’s role is that of a creative problem solver.  In business, the successful entrepreneur is the person that can see a problem or pain point and find a way to solve the problem or ease the pain.  

When you think about it, people don’t buy light bulbs – they buy the ability to see when it’s dark, meaning the person that invented the lightbulb came up with a solution to a prevalent problem that was people not being able to see very well after the sunset.  

Similarly, people don’t buy fridges – they buy the benefit of an ice cold beer or the benefit of keeping their food from going off, as soon as you get it home.  Essentially, the person that invented the fridge solved the problem of food going off due to exposure to the natural climate.

Today, however, many entrepreneurs are solving problems colloquially referred to as “first world problems” because they are rarely essential, they tend to be improvements – as an example, a can opener that can be used by someone with arthritis is a creative solution to a common problem; or the smart fridge that intelligently orders food with a local supermarket to ensure you never run out of milk… a creative solution to a common problem. In these instances, you need to adopt “design thinking”, which will help you get to your end goal faster and more efficiently.

The point being, that as an entrepreneur your job is to be a creative problem solver, yet it’s sometimes easy to get stuck and feel like we are heading our head against a brick wall.  If this sounds familiar, you’ll want to consider these two strategies for getting out of a creative rut; which are play and travel.

PLAY

As a kid, you would have been encouraged to play due to a vast range of developmental benefits yet as an adult you are less likely to engage in natural play, as life gets in the way, and what most adults consider to be play is actually very insular and isolated as it often involves sitting in front of a TV screen pressing buttons on a remote control.

Many PhD students working in the field of innovation and design are encouraged to use Lego’s to explore their ideas, which may sound ridiculous and perhaps unnecessary, when they can just use words – but this process of play helps get their creative juices flowing and encourage the development of ideas, particularly in the context of group work.

TRAVEL

Sometimes, when we are faced with an intellectual challenge particularly one relating to entrepreneurship we get so bogged down in the problem we barely come up for air – meaning we end up living and breathing the problem rather than being able to engage in blue sky thinking and find a creative solution to the problem at hand.

Similarly, writers that get ‘stuck’ call this writer’s block which is why so many writers tend to spend a lot of time travelling, as travel broadens the horizons and a change of scenery is sometimes all that’s needed to shift one’s focus and let the penny drop.