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Perhaps creativity (along with resilience) is one of the most important skills we can teach our kids going forwards to survive in the world. It’s here now, but it’s coming soon.

It’s rubbish though, it doesn’t exist, it’s in the ether, it can’t be measured. It’s not easy to make money directly from creativity for normal people.

Writing a blog that publishes every single day requires discipline and attentive creativity (even if the blog itself is barely mediocre) but in the car the other day we had a lesson of creativity with my two youngest children Rosie (14) and Callum (10).

I was picking Callum up from a birthday party on our crazy Tuesday night schedule which involves him at football training, Rosie at dancing and Grace at swimming, together with dog walking being required in amongst usual domestic duties.

Travelling from the party to Rosie’s dancing the kids were asking me about the blog (Rosie is particularly interested in the blog, she is the one of my children who has the big philosophical slant like me).

I discussed the fact that I was getting to the point where I needed to write some more blogs for the following week, and we talked about how I could do that.

I wanted to demonstrate to them the Edward de Bono concept of creating creativity from the ridiculous (I’m sorry if I’d told this story in the blog before but I can’t remember back all 1700).

I went to see Edward de Bono speak (he was the author of Lateral Thinking). He did a demonstration that day of how to use ridiculous ideas to provoke and prompt creativity in individuals.

He actually designed a phenomenally clever way of solving the London taxi shortage problem in about 10 minutes by asking the audience to think of ridiculous ideas.

And so, we did it in the car. Predictably Callum just wanted to shout things about things that we were driving past, but that worked too. Rosie wanted me to talk about the difference between what things are ‘supposed to be like’ and what they’re actually like. I think from that she was talking about what her friends post on social media.

The ideas from that car journey will populate the blog this week, maybe see which ones are which.

Blog post number: 1762