The Creative Spark: Improving Your Imagination

Inspirational Living: Life Lessons for Success, Happiness, Motivation, Spiritual Growth, Self-Help & Positive Thinking

Listen to episode 195 of the Inspirational Living podcast: The Creative Spark: Improving Your Imagination. Adapted from Secrets of Mental Supremacy by W. R. C. Latson, published in 1913.

Self-Growth Podcast Excerpt: In no respect, I believe, do people differ so widely as in the power and activity of their faculty of imagination. Hundreds of men and women have walked and sat in an old country churchyard, and no one had observed there anything that was especially interesting or picturesque. But one day there came to the churchyard a man with a fine imagination, a poet. He saw more than mere grass and trees and headstones; and he gave to the world perhaps the most perfect poem in the English language. His name is Thomas Gray, and the poem was the famous “Elegy in a Country Churchyard.”

Likewise, countless people had seen an apple fall from a tree to the ground. But one day a person with a great imagination saw that commonplace thing. His imagination seized upon it, and he propounded Newton’s theory of the law of gravitation, one of the most important achievements in the whole history of human thought. And so we might go on indefinitely. Enough, perhaps, to repeat that the world's masters have always been possessed of fine and daring imagination, and that, without great powers of imagination, there can be accomplished no great or important work of any nature whatsoever.

Perhaps you feel that your own imagination does not always serve you as well as it should. Perhaps you are wishing that it was better — that you could produce in it such improvement as to enable you to create some good and worthy thing in the world. In that case, I am glad to be able to tell you that, of all the powers of the mind, none is capable of being so easily, conveniently, and rapidly cultivated as the imagination. And I may remark that, as in the case of other faculties, the means taken to cultivate the imagination will at the same time train and strengthen your mind in every other direction.

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