The House of Creativity.
Did you get to watch Elizabeth Gilbert’s Creativity Ted Talk? She’s done several but this particular one highlights on creativity as an individual. Creativity has so many definitions and expectations. So much so that it’s hard to keep up and not feel some form of pressure on your creative ability. For today’s sake, creativity will be defined as the use of imagination to create something that’s new and valuable. Trudging on honesty, the words ‘new’ and ‘valuable’ elicit both excitement and weary. While excitement come come from the thought of having the ability or prowess to create something that is quite different from the norm and valuable, weary could come from doubting this ability; thinking “there’s so much that already exists, I don’t think anything new could come from my head” or “ this idea has a high potential of failing and I can’t (won’t) go ahead.”
Nouvelle ideas are sometimes great and inspiring. Their reception is phenomenal and they blow your mind away. While accepting new ideas and products can be relatively easy, producing and rendering one can be daunting because it seems to be a public show of intellectual incompetence.
The reason for this could be the environment but that’s a topic for another day. Though common, the fear of bringing light to ideas doesn’t apply to everyone. So, Yay everyone who’s not affected by societal pressure, y’all rock!
Back to Elizabeth the OG. She hammers on the dissociation of creativity from the human self. Basically separating the human being and the creative being (genius). Expanding on this, Elizabeth explains that in the past, great creative work was attributed to a magical external being which lived within the walls, completely relieving the human from the burden of pounding their brains and scribing in vein ink. Hence creative dependency fell on external factors. The job of the human creator, the contract details actually, is to show up to work no matter how simple or complex. A great work equaled a harmonious synergy of the human creator and the invisible enhancer. Well, it seems the concept embraced by Elizabeth Gilbert and a few others might have been long forgotten. It’s successors have become watered-down whispers with little effect.
“I believe creativity is a force of enchantment, not entirely human in its origins.”
-Elizabeth Gilbert, 2016
It is common practice to take creativity as out-of-the-box thinking. Yes, the proverbial box that can’t be found for some weird reason. How in the world do we find this box and capture creativity, probably trap it in a bottle?
According to Tim Harford, creativity often comes when an idea is moved from its original context and application onto something different. It is applying patterns from one box (one field) to another. It gets easier to be creative when you have varied knowledge and apply these across whatever problem arises.
Creativity can be turned on and tuned up. It starts with an enabling environment that doesn’t punish creative mistakes. Such an environment opines that there is no one right answer to a problem or question and individuals nurtured in this environment make more subject connections. What we get is individuals producing so many creative ideas that this becomes a norm. At least this way there’s little fear of exposing intellectual incompetence because we’re all insufficient or enlightened in one area or several. Yes, there will be no nose wrinkling here.
By eliminating the tension associated with sharing new ideas, the dopamine high we experience after sharing ideas, you know the one that makes you lazy afterwards, might not be the stumping drug it can be.
High level, we could just list out factors which influence creativity such as imagination, habitat, attitude, culture, knowledge, and resources. Low level, we would need to individually address these factors and that would be a lot of work on my part. So think through them and find if they apply to you and how they do.
At the end of the day, you should take this with a grain of salt until you can fully see the part of the elephant from my standpoint.
