What is it that makes a creative person creative?
Having engaged in more creative pursuits recently (website building, writing online, starting a podcast, etc.) this question has been on my mind.
I’ve always thought there were two types of people: (1) creative people and (2) uncreative people. Creative people go on to become artists, musicians, and comics while uncreative people go on to become accountants, lawyers, and teachers.
But lately I’ve had second thoughts about this simple framing.
I certainly don’t doubt that there’s natural (and perhaps significant) variance in creative ability across people, but I’ve started to seriously question the underlying assumption that creativity is this innate attribute that one either has or doesn’t have. Over time, I’ve become increasingly convinced that creativity is much more like a muscle that can be worked.
A simple definition for creativity might be something like: the ability to generate and express novel ideas. Using this definition, a fair question to ask to test my suspicions might be, “How might an average (or self-defined uncreative) person actually go about improving their creative output?”
Drawing from recent experiences, here are 3 tactics that I’ve found to be highly effective:
[1] Hold your ideas captive.
Most people are actually full of ideas. The issue isn’t “lack of creativity”. It’s “lack of captivity”.
Ideas are elusive and fleeting. They show up spontaneously and if not deliberately held captive they quickly escape. When I first started brainstorming written content to produce, I seriously struggled to come up with material. But over time, I forced myself to write down any and all ideas that randomly sprung to mind. I found this practice to be powerful.
A month ago, I struggled to generate even one topic idea to write about. Today, I have a list of over 50 that continues to grow. Prioritize capturing your ideas.
[2] Set aside time for ideation.
I recently started reading Steven Pressfield’s 2002 book, “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles”.
In it, Pessfield shares an insightful truth about writing. He states, “There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.”
I’ve found the same to be true with idea generation more broadly. The mind works in unusual ways. When you make a concerted effort to generate ideas, unpredictable thoughts often surface on their own. If you haven’t set aside time solely for ideation, don’t be so quick to undercut your creative potential.
As Woody Allen famously said, “90% of success is just showing up”.
[3] Don’t kill your ideas so quickly.
While the emergence of new ideas happens suddenly, actualizing them requires incredible patience. Most people kill their ideas before they’ve had an opportunity to get off the ground.
In reflecting on “creative geniuses”, I’ve come to question the assumption that it’s the quality of their ideas that have made them so successful. Instead, I’m much more inclined to believe that it’s the willingness to work on an idea far longer than others that results in creative achievement.
Albert Einstein once said, “It’s not that I’m smarter. It’s that I stay with problems longer than others.” Don’t be so quick to reject an idea unless it’s had an opportunity to prove itself out.
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It’s quite possible that I’m overweighting my personal experience in assuming that creativity is as flexible as I think it is. But it’s interesting. Growing up, “creativity” was a domain I’d have categorized myself as lacking in.
But the more time I spend thinking, acting, and iterating on so-called creative pursuits, the more I surprise myself. Hold your ideas captive, dedicate time for ideation, and give your ideas a runway to prove themselves out. I bet you’re more creative than you think.
