Creativity is combining things in new ways. It’s making tasty stews: just take lots of raw materials, chop them up, add your special spice and let them cook.

The game for advisors, and us at Swift Kick, is where do you get the raw materials, and then, importantly, where do you get the time to cook.

An RSS Reader goes a long ways towards helping both of these challenges.

It automates most of the process of raw material acquisition – delivering raw material directly to me. The time I save getting my raw material delivered helps free up time to cook – or play with how the ideas I see might be applied to my work.

The idea for this collaborative blog – a new thing to this student affairs, came from a mashup of
Marketingprofs.com and some thinking about relevancy and education.

For anyone that clicks over to marketing professors from the newsletter, you may be surprised to see that the design for Marketing Professors is very similar to the design for this blog and the Activities + Affairs Newsletter:

This is one of the ways we make time for creativity – we borrow lots. We use other’s recipes and tweak them so they fit our needs.

In making stews, we “steal” non-copyrighted methods and designs every where we can. This way, we can focus on the creative value – a peer driven learning community for activities professionals – rather than on the details – the color scheme of the newsletter.

This process is very digital – software, music, movies, pictures, once digital, are great for mashing together in new and interesting ways. It’s where the world is at now.

So here’s the prescription:

1) Get an RSS reader, find some folks both in and out of academia who are interesting and thought provoking and who write blogs – subscribe to those blogs.

2) Focus on the ideas, not the how. Know that you can borrow most of the how.

This is how two non-designer, non-programmer folks were able to launch this community platform.

What “new” is waiting for you?