The Saturday List - December 6, 2025

This Week: Maintaining a Creative Edge

Trying something different this week.

Feel like you lack that creative edge? Here are 5 tips that have, at some point in my career, helped me at least feel more creative.

1. Write It Out By Hand

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to meet up with a Syracuse sportscasting colleague and friend named Jason Knapp. If that name is familiar to you, it’s because he has been part of the coverage of the past seven Olympics on the Networks of NBC; he also covers college sports and Olympic sports during the years when Olympics aren’t being contested.

When we met up, he was in the Chicago area to cover swimming. And, during breakfast, he showed me SOME of the prep work for covering these events.

Charts, statistics, record times, bios of each competitor. For a ton of events: men and women, short distances, long distances, a variety of strokes.

But the real edge comes not just from studying the charts, but from adding to them…in his own handwriting. Jason finds additional nuggets from the web, and from his own research, and adds these pieces in the margins.

(L to R) WAER-FM colleagues Dave Van de Walle and Jason Knapp; many years after handling play-by-play of Syracuse vs. Seton Hall at the Meadowlands

Research backs this up: here’s an excerpt from Scientific American that shows just part of the benefit (this particular research was on the reason that students should learn to take notes by hand while in the classroom):

But the idea of writing things down goes beyond just studying for class or covering sports; consider how actively engaged you need to be to take notes about…ANYTHING. What’s the shopping list look like? What are the big things you need to accomplish this week? What should your next blog post be about?

Get out the pen and paper and give it a whirl…

2. Use ChatGPT and its Ilk for the Absurd

I talked a little more about this on my Area 224 site this week — part of my December of Content — A couple years back, I managed a team of a half-dozen or so, and we’d have weekly meetings. On the one hand, we tried to sort through what was going on with the business; but, in order to keep folks engaged AND get them to pay attention to what was coming around the corner, I made it a point to include the absurd.

Like this, a ChatGPT-created image that aimed to promote getting a colonoscopy in the style of vintage travel posters.

(The text makes no sense but the machines have gotten a little better with spelling.)

What’s the point? The absurdity leads to the creativity — or the creativity leads to the absurdity; as who but the creatively absurd would go to one of these machines and ask for such an image? — and the point is to exit your own comfort zone.

The former VP playing the tambourine? Why not.

Equal opportunity, why not the President playing the accordion?

3. Pick Up a Book, Or a Magazine, Or Visit a Website, But With a Catch…

This is an new take on an old idea that came from a VP of HR I worked with ages ago. She told me you should subscribe to a magazine that is way out of your comfort zone, maybe something that you wouldn’t customarily read, and make a point of reading it semi-religiously for a few months.

A modern take — in this world where magazine subscriptions aren’t common, and when people don’t go hang out at Barnes & Noble — would be grabbing a book on something that you wouldn’t normally read about, or a magazine that you wouldn’t normally pick up.

OR, to be even bolder: if you’re a normal viewer of MSNOW, flip on Fox News. Or vice versa. Just occasionally.

It’s important to spur your creativity to figure out just how other people THINK. Not everyone thinks like you do, and that’s a plus.

4. In Your Repertoire, One of Each of These…

You should know a quick joke. (Maybe a longer one, too, it’s okay to be off-color…)

• Guy isn’t feeling well, goes in for a full day of tests to find out what’s wrong. Doctor comes in at the end of the day and says “I have good news and bad news. The good news? They’re naming a disease after you.”

You should know a piece of trivia.

• Salmon P. Chase is on the $10,000 bill.

You should have a poem memorized.

“The Red Wheelbarrow,” by William Carlos Williams

Why, though? Not only is it fun to learn and retain information, you are exercising the parts of your brain used for recall, and that’s never a bad thing. And nothing can spur creativity more than being stuck in a conversation with people and then asking them to tell you a joke.

5. Put. The. Phone. Down.

This is borderline impossible — and I know a good chunk of readers are looking on their phones right now — but it’s so important. Books. Magazines. Notebooks. Newspapers. Heck, even the television can, at times, be so much better for creativity than wasting away time on those little devices.

The “touch grass” crowd has a point: Get outside. Soak up what Vitamin D you can — close to impossible the more north you go — and breathe in the fresh air. Go for a walk, even if it’s just around the block or with the dog.

Get out a notebook or a blank canvas and just start writing stuff down or drawing or sketching.

It’s a crazy world out there and you need to be at your best, and your most creative, to tackle life’s problems.

Thanks for reading, everyone! See you next Saturday…and, in the interim, see you over at Area 224.