Ladies and Gentlemen,

Often times you will hear people say, "Life is great! Life is wonderful!" But, I wonder if you have ever esked them or have you ever asked yourself, what really makes life great and wonderful?

Well, the great and wonderful thing about life if that, as long as we live, we have the privilege if only we will exercise a little initiative and refuse to become fixed and rigid before our time. This initiative is what we call creativity or creative thinking.

By knowing and applying the principles of Creative Thinking, we can learn new skills, engage in new causes, make new friends. With these principles, we can be certain that it will help us to greater success and a happier life because one big change derived from creative thinking is an immense difference and improvement in our mental attitude and outlook.

As what Ralph Waldo Emerson said, and I quote: "The life of man is the true romance which, when it is valiantly conducted, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction." We will have a more alert, eager, searching viewpoint that will lead us to meet the challengesof creative living. We will have a positive change in our lives' pattern, in our attitude toward ourselves and our image of ourselves as we move constructively into the flow of life around us. We shall no longer retreat from life into a negative pattern of living. We can live creatively in this century of pessimism. We will learn to meet purposeful goals and by making it a daily habit to attain them, then and only then, that our lives will be meaningful. Creativity makes life more productive, fulfilling, continuously exciting and keeps us forever young.

Now, what is creativity?

As defined by W. Culp, a prominent figure in the field of education in the United States, "Creativity is the struggle for improvement, the arrangement of variables which the human can change in search for improvement."

In other words, Creativity is simply the attitude of seeking new ways of doing or of looking at things; the ability not to be bogged down by obstacles; the ability to rise after a fall; and the ability to look at the brighter side of things and events.

However, the generation of ideas is not enough to satisfy the main requirement for creativity. These new ideas must be carried through to a valuable, beneficial, and productive result. Hence, the two essential features of a creative ideaare that it be new and useful.

One good example of creativity is a man with a small bakery shop. He had noticed signs in doughnut shops, which read: "As you journey through life, let this be your goal: Keep your eye on the doughnut, and not on the hole." Thinking creatively, this baker fixed his eye on the hole rather than on the doughnut. Then he cooked the doughnut centers and offered his customers, "DELICIOUS DOUGHNUT HOLES". The people became interested, tried them and came back for more. Because of creativity, the little bakery shop grew into a big business.