How Being Able to 'Think Different' Can Lead to Success

Can creativity be learned? Yes, and the secret may lie in a fascinating concept known as "flow."

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced the idea in his best-selling book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, in 1990. Even if you haven't heard of flow, you're likely familiar with the feeling: being so engrossed in an activity — one that you find intrinsically rewarding — that you lose yourself in it. Time seems to speed up or slow down. Your ideas flow freely, the task seems almost effortless, and you feel completely in control. You might also know this as being "in the zone."

Csikszentmihalyi believed that experiencing flow can contribute to creativity and happiness. For active investors who seek to outperform market benchmarks, enhancing creativity — that is, being able to "think different" (Apple's slogan in 1997, by the way) — could reap incremental success. According to Jason Voss, a chartered financial analyst and author of The Idea Generation Investment Guide, mind mapping is the key to developing new, creative investment ideas. A mind map is a visual way to identify the interconnections that relate to a single idea, like branches extending from a tree trunk.

Map What You Know

Take some uninterrupted time to record your primary skills, such as math, languages, etc., as well as any so-called soft skills, like being a positive attitude or having good intuition about animals — things that you might share with friends. Resist the urge to self-edit. No one is going to see this list but you!

Next, see if you can connect the dots. Look for relationships between both sets of skills. Might your intuition about animals make you adept at non-verbal communication? Could you apply this to investing? For example, intuition enables the mind to work in a multi-dimensional way, not just in a linear way. Let's face it, there's always benefit in being able to read between the lines as an investor!

Map What You Don't Know

Now write down areas where your knowledge is hazy. We're prone to blind spots because we avoid what we don't like or don't know much about. With investing, maybe that's a financial product you haven't researched, or a strategy you've heard about but don't really understand yet. Ask yourself if the things you don't know about might be limiting your investing abilities in some way and, if so, what you can do about that. For example, you could expand your knowledge by taking a continuing education course or engaging with the investing community. Keep pushing the boundaries.

Scenario Planning: Your View on the State of the World

To further cultivate your creativity, it's helpful to engage in scenario planning, says Voss. Consider predetermined events — things that are unlikely to change, such as demographics or predetermined events — and the scenarios that could arise with the addition of uncertain events, such as market volatility or life surprises that can crop up. This helps you manage for the future and recognize signs that others might miss. Include facts about people, companies, countries, etc. How might these changes affect your investments? The first things that come to mind are your default mental models. This is your comfort zone, and to become more creative, you'll have to move beyond them.

Creative Breakthroughs

Here's where things can start to play out. Maybe you'll choose to combine your existing ideas into new forms for incremental creativity (for example, if you re-categorize smartphones as lifestyle rather than technology, what ideas does that generate?) or decide to shoot for a radical creative breakthrough. That might include delving into an area you don't know about, like astronomy, for example, and exploring how it relates to investing. (Does it? Who knew!) The point is to create absurd ideas that make you laugh and generate new thinking. How many idea branches can you create from the single trunk of astronomy+investing?

Regardless of the insights you achieve from these creativity-generating exercises, you still need to evaluate them within an investing framework — valuation, growth potential, liquidity and more — based on your long-term goals. But who says it can't be fun along the way?