2. Embrace New Beginnings: "Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

3. Clarify Your Vision: "A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock pile when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind." - Antoine Saint-Exupery

4. Be Patient: "The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones." - Confucius

5. Go Beyond Self-Doubt: "The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." - Sylvia Plath

6. Identify Your Real Question: "There are no right answers to wrong questions." - Ursula K. Le Guin

7. Trust Yourself Deeply: "Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts." - Rita Mae Brown

8. Let Go of Perfectionism: "And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." - John Steinbeck

9. Make Friends With Uncertainty: "The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers." - Erich Fromm

10. Find Your Natural Work Rhythm: "The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm." - Langston Hughes

11. Rethink Success: "Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful." - Albert Schweitzer

12. Acknowledge Daily Progress: "Research has shown over and over again that the more you acknowledge your past successes, the more confident you become in taking on and successfully accomplishing new ones." - Jack Canfield

13. Embrace Polarities: "The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites." - Carl Jung

14. Be Fascinated: "The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself." - Henry Miller

15. Honor Thy Intuition: "Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next." - Jonas Salk

16. Go Beyond Obstacles: "The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it." - Moliere

17. Transform Your Limiting Assumptions: "Begin challenging your assumptions. Your assumptions are the windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won't come in." - Alan Alda

18. Attract Alchemical Collaborators: "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." - Helen Keller

19. Let Discipline Be Born of Love: "Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius." - Mozart

20. Be Willing Not to Know: "By not knowing, not hoping to know and not acting like we know what's happening, we begin to access our inner strength." - Pema Chodron

21. Make More Time: "You will never find the time for anything. If you want time, you must make it." - Charles Burton

22. Reframe Failure: "I have not failed once. I've just found 10,000 ways that didn't work." - Thomas Edison

23. Put Your Stake in the Ground: "Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn't do nothing." - Duke Ellington

24. Be a Beginner: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few." - Shunryu Suzuki

25. Find Your Courage: "I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me." - Erica Jong

26. Take Some Risks: "If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner." - Tallulah Bankhead

27. Experiment with Possibilities: "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it." - Pablo Picasso

28. Act On Your Ideas: "Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them." - Alfred North Whitehead

29. Be a Divine Maniac: "Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission." - Peter Drucker

30. Act As If: "By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The non-existent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired." - Nikos Kazantzakis

31. Let Go of the Fear of Rejection: "No matter how well you perform, there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy." - Sir Laurence Olivier

32. Originate Bold, New Ideas: "I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage

33. Learn from Feedback: "Average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached. Great players want to be told the truth." - Doc Rivers

34. Suspend Logic: "Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives." - Carlos Casteneda

35. Establish Your Creative Workspace: "There is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down." - Twyla Tharp

36. Embrace Solitude: "Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without absolute solitude." - Goethe

37. Reframe Your Problem: "You can't solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to rise above it to the next level." - Albert Einstein

38. Let Go of Attachment to Results: "So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say." - Virginia Woolf

39. Be Playful: "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct arising from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves." - Carl Jung

40. Simplify: "It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas." - Charles Peguy

41. Be In the Moment: "I'll play it first and tell you what it is later." - Miles Davis

42. Persevere: "Every strike brings me closer to the next home run." - Babe Ruth

43. Source Your Own Genius: "I am my own muse, I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better." - Frida Kahlo

44. Ask for Help: "You can do anything, but not everything." - David Allen

45. Fantasize: "The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." - Albert Einstein

46. Pay Attention to the Details: "Genius is infinite painstaking." - Michelangelo

47. Freely Express Yourself: "If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself." - Rollo May

48. Let the Old Forms Die: "Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction." - Pablo Picasso

49. Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway: "I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life -- and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do." - Georgia O'Keefe

50. Honor What Makes You Unique: "There is a vitality, a life force, that is translated to you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and will be lost." - Martha Graham

51. Share Your Story: "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou

52. Explore. Dream. Discover: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." - Mark Twain

The Year of Living Creatively
Zoomstorming Sessions
Mitch Ditkoff
Idea Champions