I make my living, such as it is, on creativity, spit and a little shoe polish. Well, not so much spit and shoe polish. I'm a writer, a designer, and a serial entrepreneur. I'm also a so-called ?expert? on creativity. Which is why I found myself, at three o'clock one morning, thinking about the inherent value of creativity.
Well, that's one reason; the other is that I couldn't sleep, and I had to think about something.
Here are some of the thoughts I came up with during my late-night contemplation.
***** A Bold Assumption Of course, by discussing the ?value? of ?creativity,? I'm making the bold assumption that creativity has value.
I'd like to start by defining both terms, so we know exactly what we're talking about when we begin to converse about the value of creativity.
Dictionary.com defines value as, among other meanings:
?- Worth in usefulness or importance to the possessor; utility or merit: the value of an education. - Precise meaning or import, as of a word.?
I like the idea of creativity as the precise meaning of something, but what we're really concerned with is that creativity has value in terms of being useful or important to its ?owner.?
So what is creativity? Again, pulling up Dictionary.com:
I found three definitions, and all of them are useful in this context:
?1. Having the ability or power to create: Human beings are creative animals. 2. Productive; creating. 3. Characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative: creative writing.?
I'm going to use the third definition, ?characterized by originality and expressiveness.?
So when we talk about the ?value of creativity,? what we're saying is that it's useful or important to be able to think and produce with originality and expressiveness.
***** The Monetary Value of Creativity
But I want to digress for a moment and talk about the monetary value of creativity, which can also be very important. Creative people, and even those people who don't think of themselves as creative but do have creative thoughts, have to make a living.
How can creativity have monetary value, aside from the obvious things like rock stars and bestselling authors?
There are several things to consider here. The first is that a lot of people make a living, sometimes a very good living, doing creative work without reaching the status of movie idols. Some of those people are writers, some are graphic designers, some are lighting technicians....
But aside from those people doing obviously creative work for a living, most people who are happy and successful in their jobs are using creativity to make a living. They may be auto mechanics who have a special ear for that knock in the engine, or CEOs who are particularly astute with numbers and seem to have a knack for understanding complex figures. Whatever their official job, they're using creativity on the job because they're using originality and expressiveness in their jobs.
So creativity does have monetary value.
But let's get back to the more esoteric value of creativity.
This is going to be a series of articles that is going to help you do exactly what the title suggests ?Make the most of your search?. In this series I hope to help my readers get a better understanding of how not only to enhance the way they search the internet, but open them up to new sources to find all sorts of good relevant information.
The first part of this series is going to be a few simple search tricks. There are things you can put into the search box of just about any search engine, especially Google that can help you find what your looking for a lot quicker. Some of these tricks will bring down the number of results you get from millions to thousands possibly hundreds, bringing you more relevant/quality information.
Quotations
The first little trick most people don't know about is to put quotations around their search term. Now you may ask what does this do? Simple, when doing this the only results that will show up are ones that have those exact words in the exact order you typed them into the search box. For example if you just typed in dog training techniques you get 11,900,000 results. Now you will notice that the words you typed in may come up scattered throughout the listing, but not the whole phrase dog training techniques right in a row. Now go ahead and type in ?dog training techniques? and you get back 29,200 results. WOW that is a drastic change in the number of results shown, and notice all the words in that phrase are all next to each other in a row. This one simple trick can help you find more quality results a lot quicker, being that this really narrows the search down quite a bit.
The next few tricks are all search strings that can greatly help you narrow down your results, especially when combined with the little quotation trick mentioned above.
allintitle:
The allintitle: is a search string. Simply all you have to do is type allintitle: and then without any space type in your search term. So for dog training techniques it will look like this allintitle:dog training techniques. What this will do is bring back search results that have the all the words in that keyphrase in the title of the webpage. Now doing this brings back 149 results, all with the words in that phrase within the title. Go ahead and put quotations around the term combined with the string and you get back 75 results. These are all high quality to someone searching for that term, because the exact words they are looking for are all located in the title so these pages must be good pages for dog training techniques.
allintext:
The next string is the allintext: now can you guess what this will do? If you can't I of course will tell you. This works the same as the allintitle: string, except this will only bring back results that have your keyphrase in the text of the page as opposed to the allintitle: string which only shows results within the title. Now this doesn't narrow down the results quite as much as the allintitle: string but that is simply because there is always way more text on a page then text within the title. Nevertheless this still helps narrow down the results from a plain search. And this too can be more narrowed down if you encase your search term within quotations.
allinurl:
On to the next string allinurl:, this string brings back only results that have your keyphrase in the URL of the webpage. Obviously this works the same as the other strings, you type the string directly followed by your search term. The quotations used here will show you only sites that have your search term not only just in the url, but the words exactly in a row, in the url. This as well can bring you back way more relevant results than just simply typing your search term in the search box and hoping for the best.
allinanchor:
Now this string may seem a little tricky, but I assure you its not. The results you will get back from this are results only with your search term somewhere within that webpage, as a link. So if we typed in allinanchor:dog training techniques, any website we goto from those results will have a link somewhere on that page within the text dog training techniques in it. For any internet marketers you will know precisely how this can help you out.
Now these are a few nice tricks that can really help you get back more quality relevant results. In the next article of this series I will be discussing a few strings that can help you search different type of file formats, such as Word documents, PDF's, Excell documents, Powerpoint etc.
Article Source :
About Author
Both Angie D. Dixon & Ginfoqwd are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Angie D. Dixon has sinced written about articles on various topics from Franchise, Writing. Angie Dixon is an author, creativity expert and renaisissance woman. Contact her at mailto:angie@leoanardotrait.com or get a free creativity kit at