How to unleash our creativity? Begin by 'letting down your shield'. Stop being self conscious, afraid of playing the fool, and be open to experience. Next, 'erase your blackboard.' We all have blackboards, too—scribbled upon by other people. No one comes into the world a blank slate there are messages in the unconscious from far back in time, imprints from ancestors lost in the misty past and from our own parents. In such a way are we programmed by our culture to provide continuity for the race. But, again, what is good up to a point can become stultifying (无用的). To be creative, we have to 'erase' some of what others have written upon us and 'reinvent' ourselves. It is not easy. You have to pay attention to your unconscious, which slips messages to you much as a note is slipped under the door to your own intuition and intelligence, and to the world around you. Creativity, then, is first about paying attention to the unexpected. One artist told me, 'If you know what you are looking for, you will never see what you do not expect to find.' To pay attention means to expect without knowing what to expect. Writers say this experience happens to them all the time. 'I have no idea whence (从哪里) this tide comes, or where it goes,' author Dorothy Canfield once explained, 'but when it begins to rise in my heart, I know that a story is in the offing (即将来临).' It also happens to scientists. Physicist Charles Townes has told of the time he was frustrated in solving a huge problem on which he and others had worked long and hard. One Sunday morning he went to the park to sit on a bench among the azaleas (杜鹃花), 'and there in the early spring morning enjoyed the freshness and beauty of these gay flowers, musing over why we had so far failed. Suddenly I recognized the fallacy in my previous thinking and that of others.' Famed Hollywood director John Huston told me that when he encountered a mental block while on location, he was careful not to 'spook', not to panic. Instead, he relaxed and waited. 'When the right idea comes along,' he said, 'you'll recognize it.' No one, of course, can pay attention to everything. All of us are bombarded (轰击) daily with stimuli pouring in from society around us. Creativity requires that we stop paying general attention to everything in order to pay particular attention to something. Then we can see what previously we missed. We can look at the commonplace in a brand-new way and discover the surprising in the familiar. In the words of one student of creativity, 'If most of us tend to keep on going through the same old familiar notion, that is not because we are short on creativity but because we stifle it. Creativity demands certain leaps that we consider too daring.' There are ______ ways to unleash our creativity.