Creativity is a doing, rather than a being. The doing comes from discovering goals, and achieving them. I say discovering goals, rather than setting goals, because we’re good at setting goals--- New Year’s resolutions spring to mind---but then forgetting all about them.

Usually we forget about goals we set as New Year's resolutions because goals, although worthwhile in themselves, weren't "real" for us. We didn't explore goals deeply, and therefore didn't have any deep motivation to achieve those goals.

Motivation is all-important for creativity. If you're highly motivated to achieve a goal, you'll shock yourself with how creatively you set about achieving goal. For example, imagine you're at beach. You watch a friend swimming out beyond surf. Suddenly, you see a shadow on water, and you realize it's a shark. You're highly motivated to get your friend out of water, and you'll be creative in your efforts to achieve that goal.

This kind of deep motivation is important for any creative task. The successful achievement of task has to matter to you.

To discover what your goals are, you need to ask yourself questions

The questions you ask aren’t important. However, it is important that they be open-ended questions. That is, that they have more than one answer, and that they lead to other questions.

Asking yourself questions opens you to possibilities. Chances are, that unless you develop a program of systematically asking yourself questions, you will never discover all possibilities your life holds.

Asking questions is a simple technique, yet it’s immensely powerful. It’s heart of creativity. Up to age of eight, all kids are creative. They ask all kinds of questions. They’re determined to find answers, so they experiment in all kinds of creative ways to find them. To a kid, a question is a lot of fun.

To be creative, you need to constantly ask questions, and experiment with answers you come up with. If you do this playfully, not only will you have fun, but you'll improve your life in all kinds of ways.

Your answers to your questions will surprise you. They may even shock you. Great! If answers shock you, it means that you're accessing your subconscious, and your creativity lurks in your subconscious mind.

What questions (the treasure map) you want answers (the treasure) to?

People who invested little or nothing, and received same in return may be. They joined AOL, and immediately found their mailbox was overflowing with spam (junk email). They read some of mail and, believing what they read, bought into a program for $20. They sat back and waited, and waited, and waited and nothing happened.

Losing heart, they quit program and dropped AOL after free trial period. They now send their email to Aunt Martha, using a free ISP, which is all they really wanted to do from "get-go".

Some of these people believed many of offers that wound up in their mailbox, and bought into a few. They then started their free advertising campaign. When that didn't pay off, they started investing in paid advertising. Here a banner, there a banner, everywhere a banner, banner - they quickly learned reality of banner ads. But with no long term commitment, they folded their tents, cut their losses, and disappeared into night.

The tenacious ones failed at level one and two, but believed hype and invested in an online store. They're like guy who rented a huge vacant brick and mortar building, and then started to think about what he was going to sell. After an awful lot of work and many bucks later, he found out that just having a store isn't key to success on Internet.

So what's scoop? Is everyone doomed to failure?

Of course not - there are a lot of people making money on web. But you have to find your "niche". Unless you have very "deep pockets", like anything, you have to know what you are doing.