[version_five]

I'm also not creative. Two (unoriginal) ideas:

1. Do cross disciplinary things, a lot of creativity is really just porting common knowledge to another domain

2. Be contrarian. Assume everything you hear is wrong, unless you can connect it back to first principles you understand. You'll often end up being correct, and discovering some insight that the crowd hasn't come upon yet (the downside of this is people will think of you as a heretic)

[mapster]

Yes, contrarian can be useful to identify strongly held assumptions, once you get past all assumptions you arrive at the first principle.