“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.” ~ Steve Jobs
Please take a moment to watch the video below. It will provide you with hope and context for a wonderful new way forward. Be sure to complete your Journal of Grace in the next 7 days. God Bless, Team Grace
Selected Text From Grieve With Grace™…
Following, I have extracted a small portion of Chapter 7 of Grieve With Grace for your benefit. Enjoy!
It’s not that purpose cures grief, it’s that a heightened State of Grace leads to a heightened sense of purpose.
This means that, stone by stone, we must build the archway of Grace over the valley of dread, and feelings of great loss.
We have assembled 3 giant stones in the archway of Grace…
Gratitude requires us to become “glass half full” not “glass half empty” believers. We must become thankful for what we still have and not dwell too long on what we have lost. It is an attitude of Gratitude that sees us through hard times.
Resilience, tenacity, and grit must be our constant companions if we are to move from grief to Grace. If we do not bounce back quickly, we sink further into our own sea of tears. In life, we all get knocked down. How quickly we get back up determines the quality of our life remaining.
Authenticity requires that we look at our lives exactly where we are right now, not through rose-colored glasses to the life we fantasize it to be. It reminds us to look into the mirror, check in with our souls, and decide who we will become as we traverse from grief to Grace. If who you are is not who you aspire to be, grief can give you that big “wake-up call” you need.
Now our discussion turns to the capital C in Grace — Creativity.
As it turns out, this is elemental to moving from grief to Grace.
It is the building block that makes us look at our circumstances differently and choose which crayon in the box we will use to fill in the missing colors in our paint by numbers dreams.
As a husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, executive, and author my advice is simply this: Follow your creative passions.
Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others. Creativity is more about seeing and less about doing.
But to Grieve With Grace, we must do both: See and Do.
As Jan continued her death spiral it became abundantly clear that my life, and the lives of our entire family, would never be the same. We were all facing the no-win scenario—with no hope that our “old” normal would remain normal. And yes, as hard as it may seem, the loss of a loved one requires us to get damn creative, damn fast.
Otherwise, depression sets in and grief wins.
None of us can afford the price we must pay to live in grief forever.
It is natural to know we will mourn and then grieve. It is not natural for us to think about creative ways to shortcut our grief or grieving process.
This is why I am writing this book, especially this chapter on how Creativity heals. It is my creative attempt to help others replace endless grief with Grace and to make sense of my own issues while doing what I do best, find a way up and out of the morass of negative emotions I face—as quickly as possible.
And that pathway to our new normal, indeed, our new life, is dependent on how Creatively we look at the way things are and search for new ways to get our lives back on track and move forward to follow our passions. We must, as Steve Jobs so eloquently pointed out in the quote above, “connect experiences and synthesize new things.”
Because I have written and co-written so many books on this subject, I need to advise you up front that it will seem like I am coaching, mentoring, cajoling, demanding, advising and generally prompting you to respond.
It may seem that I am being pushy, but this is the chapter that requires us all to push the stone uphill if we must. Together. I will be using parts of our best-selling system, Success On Purpose, to help you understand the big issues at play.
Read this chapter on Creativity for the big ideas and take 30 minutes to connect personally with the exercises. If you find you need help in this area, you might consider reviewing Success On Purpose at ThinkTQ.com/SOP.
I said it before and will say it again now, there is always an easier way to do something if you are willing to seek it out. With almost 100 million data points I can assure you that every word I am about to tell you is not only true, but it is also scientifically proven to be a truth with no exceptions. In short, Creativity is critical to overcoming grief and for us to move toward Grace.
Please permit me to elaborate.
During Jan’s plunge into the darkness of untreatable cancer, I tried to find Creative new ways to express my love for her.
She loved her family, so I maintained a constant flow of communication with all of them.
She loved gardening so I made sure she counted the new blooms on the flowers outside her window.
She loved Christmas so we decorated her room like we would our home back on the pond.
Doing this was beneficial to them and cathartic for me. It was in these daily posts that I became engrossed in the psychology of grief and the grieving process.
Never having experienced a series of life or death decisions before meant that I had to remain open to new ideas while trying to make sense of my current reality. So, in my case, I did what I know to do: take notes, and write! To actually see and record what I saw and what I felt. To look at each day as an opportunity to celebrate Jan’s life, not the steady death march it was becoming.
I could easily write 500 pages on this but Creativity during a crisis is not exactly the same as being Creative inside the tomb of grief with all your hopes and dreams crushed.
My attention became focused on what happens next, not just on getting through the maze unfolding before me.
This is the fight we all must fight. Finding a way to creatively get through to the other side, where grief no longer would remain manifest in our daily lives is our daily challenge. And then purposefully and passionately ascend the wall of grief to a life of Grace up high above the valley of doom and dread.
It may seem a daunting task to creatively address giant words like denial… anger… depression… bargaining… to reach some form of accepting our lot in life.
And yet, Acceptance of your loss is not all you want. Grace is our target.
And in a time of depression and anger, only Creativity can set you free.
Following your creative passion is your truth behind personal freedom.
When I lost Jan, I lost my plan for my life. I lost my drive, my goals, and my vision for what I wanted. I lost a partner who helped me with my work, my home, and every other part of my life. I lost my dinner companion. I lost my lover and my friend.
With her gone, I could not imagine life without her. My plans, my hopes, and dreams—were all just crumpled into wadded-up paper and thrown in the trash. I could not see anything ahead of me that even remotely resembled the life I had. My life wasn’t perfect.
But it was perfectly wonderful with Jan.
After Jan’s death, I believed life would never be as good or as rewarding. And a good life, from now on with the loss I had just experienced, was not even conceivable. Yet, I knew I had to keep carrying on in some fashion.
Survival, without all the benefits of my previous visions of a good life, was not all that desirable, but it was a daily requirement. Just needing to survive had a life-changing impact on me in both small ways and in large purpose/mission focus.
The unfortunate truth is that I slowly moved from a thriving mentality to a survival state of mind.
My old life was over. I accepted that. I also accepted the fact that it was my responsibility to creatively design a new life. If not, I would forever live in the past and never climb out of this deep hole of sadness and regret I was in.
It was exactly like starting all over.
Like editing a movie after the lead actor dies. All of the scenes that included Jan, which were almost all the parts in the movie in my head, were now cut out and somehow, in some way, had to be replaced with something else.
I had to come up with something new or I would be stuck in this grieving mentality of simply settling to get by every day with no hope for anything more. Acceptance and settling were not in my nature. Never has been, never will be.
Yes, I saw that merely accepting my loss did me no good. I had to accept creative control moving from wallowing in self-pity to the vibrancy of life we all pray for. Indeed, the Creativity stone had to be set in place.
I would love to tell you that this is an easy stone to turn. It is not. Gratitude can become a conditioned-response habit.
We naturally become Resilient when we find our true Authenticity. Empathy becomes natural when we open ourselves up to others.
But releasing our natural Creativity requires a completely different mindset.
It is messy. It is personal.
It requires us to not only look but to see.
It requires energy and focus.
Tremendous focus both inward and outward. Again, a form of Synergistic Empathy for yourself and others.
Then, here’s the hard part, it requires us to ACT.
Summary
To Grieve With Grace means you will heal With Grace.
By building Resilience with Gratitude and becoming Authentically you. Creatively you. Empathetically you.
If you pursued the articles below you now understand how the experts see Creativity.
You are naturally Creative.
Believe it.
You are smart enough to design life beyond grief. Believe it.
As my story reflects, we always have a choice between remaining in grief or a life of Grace.
No question, we are always at the crossroads of Grief and Grace.
This is the essence of what it means to Grieve With Grace.
We either stay longer in denial, bargaining, anger, depression and merely hope for acceptance…
Or…
We increase our State of Grace by becoming more Grateful, Resilient, Authentic, Creative, and Empathetic.
For many, it comes too late when we recognize we had a choice. Choose wisely.
Why Not Build The Bridge of Grace Over The Raging Tears of Grief?
• Do you feel lost in the tears or are you living in Grace?
• How will you escape the natural pull of grief down into the void?
• What life-experience from your past will guide your future?
Grief or Grace is a choice. Choose wisely.
Moving Beyond Acceptance
The Healing Power of Creativity
Below you will find several credible (but easy to read) articles that will cement your understanding of the power of Creativity in your healing from a great loss. Now, we would like to guide your thinking here, giving you some specific ideas for actions you can use immediately. You can answer them personally, or use them as discussion group questions. They have been crafted to condense all the big points into actionable bits of great information! Remember, to build your bridge of Grace you must move beyond merely accepting your loss. You must also accept responsibility for life after grief.
Your Creativity Journal: Accepting Loss…
Your Creativity Journal: Accepting Responsibility…
Appendix Listings For The Curious & Committed…
As promised, we have included several valuable resources here to help you move from grief and move your life toward Grace. My goal is to give you the information and tools you need to overcome that “stuck” feeling you might find yourself in. In researching the field of advice to help you move from merely accepting grief vs. accepting your personal responsibility to grow forward, I discovered a wealth of information you might find very comforting or completely useless.
I understand.
My readers may want to understand the scientific aspects of this subject. Some will take my conclusions on the surface, others may want something of a professional bibliography. I decided to take a simple approach and give you a few select articles to help you better understand the practical science behind Grieve With Grace. Many of the articles are very complex and scholarly reviews of each of our 5 keywords.
I selected a few that I thought were easy to read yet give you the full flavor of the topic. If you are a professional Grief Counselor you will already have your own knowledge base, but will find clarity in the references below. If you are a person who is interested in becoming a Grace Counselor, the following will give you a platform for understanding.
Grace Counselor Resources
Article 1: Creativity
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/creativity
Creativity encompasses the ability to discover new and original ideas, connections, and solutions to problems. It’s a part of our drive as humans—fostering resilience, sparking joy, and providing opportunities for self-actualization.
An act of creativity can be grand and inspiring, such as crafting a beautiful painting or designing an innovative company. But an idea need not be artistic or world-changing to count as creative. Life requires daily acts of ingenuity and novel workarounds; in this sense, almost everyone possesses some amount of creativity.
Sources of Creativity
There are many pieces to the puzzle of creativity, including a balance between controlled, deliberate thought and spontaneous play and imagination. Personality plays a role, as well as biology and life experience.
But everyone possesses some measure of creativity, even if they don’t realize it. Life is full of small moments that require new ideas or surprising solutions. A choice that you don’t think twice about—how you cook a fried egg or the route you take to work—someone else might find delightfully original.
Why are some people more creative than others?
Creative people embody complexity; they show tendencies of thought and action that are segregated in others, according to the pioneering creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. They balance intense energy with quiet rest, playfulness with discipline, fantasy with reality, and passion for their work with objectivity.
Neuroscience research seems to support this idea. Creative people may better engage the three brain systems—the default mode network, the salience network, and the executive control network—that collectively produce creative thought.
Which personality traits are linked to creativity?
The trait of Openness to Experience correlates with creativity, encompassing a receptivity to new ideas and experiences. People who are low in openness prefer routines and familiarity, while those who are high in openness revel in novelty, whether that is meeting new people, processing different emotions, or traveling to exotic destinations. Accumulating these experiences and perspectives can help the brain forge creative new connections. Other characteristics that are linked to creativity include curiosity, positivity, energy, persistence, and intrinsic motivation.
What is “everyday creativity”?
Everyday creativity is a framework originally developed by Ruth Richards, Dennis Kinney, and colleagues at Harvard Medical School defined as expressions of originality and meaningfulness. This could encompass daily errands, personal hobbies, or work. Making wacky recipes or dying your hair an unusual color would qualify, as would working on a scrapbook of memories for a friend.
What are “little-c” and “Big-C” creativity?
People sometimes refer to “little-c” or “Big-C” to discuss different degrees of creativity. This framework was expanded into a theory called The Four C Model of Creativity by researchers James Kaufman, Ronald Beghetto. Mini-c refers to creativity that arises in any learning process and little-c refers to consistent everyday creativity. Pro-c is the progression to professional expertise in a given domain, while Big-C is reserved for monumental and historic contributions to society.
How to Be More Creative
Many people feel that they have no or very limited creative ability—even some who work in creative fields—and it’s true that certain individuals are more creative than others. Fortunately, however, creativity can be acquired and honed at any age or experience level.
Innovation is not some divine gift; it’s actually the skilled application of knowledge in new and exciting ways. It requires changing up your normal routine, stepping outside of typical comfort zones, and paying attention to the present moment.
When learning new information, taking a break—either by sleeping or simply enjoying a distraction—is another way of allowing the unconscious mind to process the data in novel and surprising ways. This often lays the groundwork for a creative insight or breakthrough.
How can I become more creative?
Various lines of research have converged around common insights that provide steps to be more creative:
1. Aim for output: Creative geniuses often produce their best works at their times of greatest output. Some pieces may miss the mark, but the quantity of output makes it likely that other pieces will yield great creativity.
2. Be willing to go deep: In the realm of artistic creativity, pioneers often spend time in solitude, feel emotions and sensations deeply, and aren’t afraid to self-reflect.
3. Be open and playful: The personality trait most tied to creativity is Openness to Experience—whether that be intellectual, aesthetic, or emotional.
4. Capture your ideas: Remember to record thoughts as they arise so they aren’t forgotten.
5. Adopt or hire outside perspectives: It can be difficult to innovate if you become trapped in the rules and language of your domain of expertise.
6. Feel free to procrastinate: If you are motivated to solve a problem, procrastinating, exercising, or sleeping on it can lead to divergent thinking and more possibilities.
What leads to a “eureka moment”?
Most of the time, ideas develop from the steady percolation and evaluation of thoughts and feelings. But every so often, a blockbuster notion breaks through in a flash of insight that’s as unexpected as it is blazingly clear. So-called “aha moments” can generate the brilliant idea for a tech startup, the theme of a musical composition, or the answer to an engineering quandary.
Improving the odds of having a “eureka moment” involves toggling between two modes of thinking: conscious, methodological, concerted problem solving and the restful, spontaneous, unplanned connections of the default mode network, the brain’s resting state. In this way, the default mode network can inspire new solutions when all of the puzzle pieces are in place.
Can creativity be taught?
Can creativity be practiced?
Several strategies can help build your creative muscle. One is to find a problem that needs solving, and another is to be open to new opportunities, such as trying new foods or using a new approach to complete a task at work. Another is to change your perspective, such as by imagining what somebody else or somebody in a different time period might think. Yet another is to simply create—creativity requires risk-taking and critical feedback, but persisting through discomfort can lead to an innovative and daring outcome.
Does creativity benefit mental health?
Creativity may offer some surprising psychological benefits. It can contribute to the ability to make meaning—such as finding ways to successfully cope with past experiences such as trauma, regret, or nostalgia, helping to manage moods, relationships, and problem-solving, and establishing one’s professional and personal legacy for the future. Well-being, in turn, may facilitate creative thinking, such as by practicing mindfulness, research suggests.
Creativity and the Brain
Creative thinking involves making new connections between different ideas, which is accomplished by cultivating divergent thinking skills and deliberately exposing yourself to new experiences and to learning. While research psychologists are interested in tapping innovative thinking, clinical psychologists sometimes encourage patients to use artistic expression as a way to confront difficult feelings.
Three key networks operate as a team to spark creativity in the brain, research suggests. The default mode network helps generate ideas, the executive control network evaluates them and propels them forward, and the salience network identifies which ideas are relevant and important. These networks may also influence one another via other feedback loops; for instance, the executive control network might tune the way the salience network scans internally, depending on the task at hand.
What is the default mode network?
The default mode network is the pattern of brain activity that occurs when people are not focused on the outside world. It’s the network that becomes active when the mind turns inward, as people daydream, rest, and reflect on the past or imagine the future. The default mode network can spark connections between different ideas, contributing to creative thought.
What is the salience network?
The salience network is a large system within the brain that helps to detect and filter important information from the environment, and then determine how to respond to that information. It scans for relevant signals, whether they contain sensory, cognitive, or emotional information. The salience network is rooted in the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, but it contains nodes in other regions as well.
What is the executive control network?
The executive control network, or executive function, refers to the systems and processes that allow people to plan, monitor, and execute their goals. In the context of creativity, executive functioning monitors the observations, connections, and ideas that are generated, directs attention to particular ideas, and oversees decision-making in the context of a larger goal.
What is divergent thinking?
A hallmark of creativity, divergent thinking involves generating multiple ideas or solutions to a problem. It’s original and imaginative, exploring as many different connections as possible. By contrast, convergent thinking is converging onto a single, correct answer or solution, by analyzing the information available and judging which answer is best.
Does creativity arise from the right side of the brain?
Creativity and Mental Illness
From Vincent van Gogh to Sylvia Plath and Winston Churchill, individuals with mental illness have unleashed intellectual and artistic genius throughout history. The connection has fascinated psychologists and everyday individuals alike. What biological theories might explain the overlap? And what evolutionary advantages might these individuals possess?
Are highly creative people more likely to have mental illness?
Psychotic spectrum disorders, including bipolar disorder, schizotypy, and schizophrenia, are disproportionately diagnosed in highly creative individuals (they’ve been most often measured in artists, musicians, and writers) or in their first-degree relatives.
But this connection can be confounded by the degree of giftedness at play. While creative types are more mentally stable than are non-creatives, the correlation reverses in the presence of exceptional creativity. Extraordinarily creative individuals are more likely to exhibit psychopathology than are noncreative people, according to University of California at Davis psychologist Dean Keith Simonton. He dubs this concept the “Mad Genius Paradox.”
Why do genius and mental illness often overlap?
An inability to filter out seemingly irrelevant information is a hallmark of both creative ideation and disordered thought. The state, known as reduced latent inhibition, allows more information to reach awareness, which can in turn foster associations between unrelated concepts. The barrage accounts for both the nonsensical ideas seen in psychosis and for novel thinking.
One hypothesis for the mystery between genius and mental illness is rooted in the diametric theory, an idea put forth by sociologist Christopher Badcock and evolutionary biologist Bernard Crespi to explain how autism and schizophrenia are poles on one cognitive continuum. (In this theory, paternal gene expression pushes towards mechanistic thinking—autism at its most extreme—and maternal genes produce mentalizing traits—psychosis at its most extreme.)
The theory makes a key prediction—that epoch-making minds, likely including John Nash’s and Isaac Newton’s, exhibit both hypermechanistic and hypermentalizing extremes. These men were both autistic and schizophrenic—double outliers. True genius in some realms, especially mathematics and science, could represent that unique overlap.
Is there a genetic link between creativity and mental illness?
Some research has found that genetic variants that are more common in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are also more common in certain creative professions. However, it’s difficult to conduct reliable studies of the link between genetics and a broad trait like creativity. What we do know, however, is that many mental health conditions, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, have a genetic component, so the condition and potentially related traits are passed down from one generation to the next.
Could there be an evolutionary trade-off between psychiatric illness and creativity?
Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia can be debilitating illnesses, so scientists have wondered why these conditions have persisted over time. Some believe that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder offer an evolutionary advantage, in that they predispose individuals to greater creativity, achievement, and success that can benefit both individuals and societies.
How can people with mental illness balance the importance of medication with their creative goals?
People with bipolar disorder can be deeply concerned that medication will strip away the creativity and productivity that accompany manic episodes. Therefore it’s important to address the topic in therapy.
Therapists should explain that manic energy can be confused for creative skill; mania often deludes individuals into believing they are greater than their skills. The pair can discuss the patient’s innate talents and skills to develop, and then devise a strategy to do so following mood stabilization, continuing to adapt to new circumstances or challenges as they arise.
Dark Creativity
Creativity is typically seen as a socially beneficial trait. But some people use their imagination in pursuit of antisocial ends—what’s sometimes termed “dark creativity” or “malevolent creativity.”
A scam artist who devises a novel or foolproof scheme for luring his victims is exercising creativity. But as it’s being deployed to harm others and enrich himself, most observers would find his scheme objectionable, no matter how imaginative.
In recent years, researchers have sought a greater understanding of how darkness and creativity interrelate. Some studies have found that creativity is associated with narcissism; others have identified a link between higher creativity and reduced honesty and humility. In one study, dispositional creativity was found to predict unethical behavior.
Ultimately, creativity may be better conceived as neither inherently positive nor inherently negative. Instead, it may be best to assess motivations and outcomes when judging the value of any creative act.
What motivates dark creativity?
One distinction between light and dark creativity involves who benefits and who stands to be harmed by the creative pursuit. Light creativity is associated with ways to benefit others in society, or at least not detract from their welfare, such as composing a moving symphony or founding a tech start-up. Dark creativity is primarily associated with harming others or helping oneself without caring about the potential for collateral damage—devising an elaborate plot to rob a store, for example.
Which traits are associated with dark creativity?
Malevolent creativity has been linked to childhood experiences, such as neglect, and traits in the dark triad, such as narcissism. Another characteristic linked to dark creativity is aggression. In one study, premeditation (planning ahead of time) controlled an individual’s expression of malevolent creativity more than implicit aggression—in other words, being able to hold off on your impulses can make even those primed to be aggressive and darkly creative less harmful when provoked.
Can creativity fall between light and dark?
Some argue that creativity exists on a spectrum and creative pursuits can exist in the gray area between light and dark. For example, if someone comes up with a clever white lie to avoid meeting someone, that original and plausible idea might lean toward a darker use of creative thinking. The grayer areas of creativity arise when it’s not completely clear where the eventual benefit of the creative behavior lies. For example, is hacktivism bright creativity or dark?
Article 2: What is creativity? The ultimate guide to understanding today’s most important ability.
https://99designs.com/blog/creative-thinking/what-is-creativity/
Creativity is one of those traits that people seem to have an intrinsic understanding of, but if you actually ask them to define it, they get tripped up. It’s easy to come up with a list of creative people (Frida Kahlo, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Einstein), and the outcomes of creativity (a novel, an invention, a new way of looking at the world), but it’s difficult to wrap your head around the actual concept of creativity. The more I researched this article, the more I realized creativity is an incredibly nuanced phenomenon.
But you have to start somewhere, so let’s begin with a definition:
Creativity is the ability to transcend traditional ways of thinking or acting, and to develop new and original ideas, methods or objects.
Let’s break that down:
- It’s an ability
It’s also an ability to run a mile, or to do calculus or recite a Shakespearean sonnet (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?). So creativity is a skill that is specific to an individual. For some people, it might seem to come naturally, but it is something that anyone can improve at if they give it the time and effort. - It transcends traditional ways of thinking or acting
Transcending means you’re going above and beyond. It’s recognizing the limitations of what already exists, and trying to improve upon it. - It develops new and original things
I think the key word here is develops. Creativity goes beyond imagining: it’s about developing. If it’s an idea, you go out and do the research to prove it. If it’s a new process you try and test it to see if it works. If it’s an object, you build it.
Great! And now that I’ve provided you with that enlightening definition, let’s wade a bit deeper and try to really understand what creativity is (and why you should or shouldn’t care).
Creativity is a relatively new phenomenon
Creativity has only been a thing for the past 60-80 years or so.
“But wait,” you say, “what about all those amazing artists and inventors of yester-year. Are you telling me you don’t think Mark Twain and Sir Isaac Newton weren’t creative? Preposterous!”
I am certainly not one to dis the fathers of Tom Sawyer and gravity. What I’m saying is that the concept of creativity as we understand it—even though it seems so ubiquitous—wasn’t really part of the popular lexicon until midway through the last century:
In many ancient cultures, ideas or advancements that we would attribute to an individual’s creativity were deemed “discoveries.” Even artwork was seen as an imitation of nature rather than a form of creation.
In the medieval Christian world, creative ideas were positioned as divine inspiration. Did you do something awesome? You owe god a high five for sending that fantastic idea your way, my friend.
With the dawning of the enlightenment, we started to see a gradual shift towards individual responsibility, but even then the focus was on imagination and intelligence—both of which are definitely part of the modern definition of creativity, but not quite the same thing.
Where we really begin to see the emergence in the idea of modern creativity is in the 1920s. With the birth of psychology1 at the end of the 19th century, paradigms in the western world shifted to focus more intently on the individual, and our unique capabilities and personalities. (Another one of those things that we think as innate—personality wasn’t really a thing until Freud.) Creativity as an ability, or a personality trait, first gained popularity after Graham Wallas’ book Art of Thought. In this work, Wallas presents a model for how humans approach problems and think creatively.
And thus, the modern idea of creativity was born. Since then, psychologists and researchers in other disciplines have only continued to develop the idea into what we understand today.
So does that mean that no one was creative until the 1930s? No, clearly humans have had the ability to think outside the box and develop new ideas for a long time. What the current focus on creativity does show is that it’s a valued quality in our culture right now. The focus on it as a coveted trait can probably be linked to the rapid development of new ideas and technology in the past century.
Creativity is a pattern of thinking
So we know that creativity is an ability that allows people to develop new ideas, but that still feels a bit vague and intangible (kind of like saying swimming is the ability to not drown in water—technically true, but not particularly useful if you’re going for a deeper understanding, or ya know, wanting to not drown). Put on your floaties and let’s dive into the deep end.
All skills originate in our brains: whether it’s physical (learning to do the breaststroke) or mental (learning to solve an algebraic equation), it’s all about neurons in the right part of your brain firing over and over again until what you’re doing becomes ingrained.2
Creativity is the skill to transcend traditional ways of thinking and come up with new ideas. But where do these new ideas come from?
Forget left vs. right-brained, it’s all about the networks.
Like the persistent “we only use 10% of our brains” myth, the concept of left-brained = creative vs. right-brained = analytical is total pseudoscience.
Yes, there are parts of our brain that have specific functions, but it’s the connections between these areas, and the subsequent networks they create which creates cognition. For example, if you’re trying to climb over a log that’s fallen on a path, you’re likely engaging the network which links the parts of your brain that process visual images and govern motor coordination. If you’re explaining to a friend how to climb over said log, add in the parts of your brain which control language.
When it comes to creativity, neuroscientists have identified three large-scale (and aptly named) networks of the brain that are important:
- The executive attention network helps you pay attention and focus
- The imagination network allows you to daydream or imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes
- The salience network let’s you identify when things you have buried deep in your brain are salient to the world around you (e.g. you’re going for a hike and taking in the scenery, and you notice this plant… realize it looks familiar… and that it’s poison ivy! And you just saved yourself from a terrible itchy rash.)
The more active these networks are in your brain, and the more they work together, the more creative you are.3
So going back to our original question: what is creativity? Creativity is a skill that allows you to draw understanding of the world around you, connect those observations to your existing knowledge reservoirs, and imagine new applications of your knowledge on the world.
Is there a connection between creativity and intelligence?
So if it’s all about what’s going on in certain brain networks, does that mean that creative people are smarter? I wish I had an easy yes or no answer for you, but the study of creativity is still a pretty new thing, and the research isn’t entirely settled on this matter yet.
In 1999, researchers Sternberg and O’Hara provided a framework of five possible relationships between creativity and intelligence:
- Creativity is a type of intelligence
- Intelligence is a type of creativity
- Creativity and intelligence are overlapping constructs (they have some traits in common)
- Creativity and intelligence are part of the same construct (they’re basically the same thing)
- Creativity and intelligence are distinct constructs (there is no relationship between them)
There are studies that provide evidence in favor of each of these perspectives, but thus far none has been overwhelming in its conclusions. So essentially there’s nothing that shows if you’re smarter you’re more creative. But there’s nothing showing that there’s not a correlation either.
Are children more creative than adults?
If you do a Google search on creativity, you’ll pretty quickly run into an article that mentions a study run by Professor George Land that seems to show that children become less creative over time.
The gist: Land worked with NASA to develop a creativity test that would help them select innovative engineers and scientists for the space program. In 1968, he and colleague Beth Jarmen gave the same test to 1,600 children and found that—shock—98% of five-year-olds were apparently creative geniuses. And we all just got less and less creative as we aged, until only a measly 2% of us adults qualify as creative geniuses.
Now, maybe I’m just bitter because I’m jealous of all those child prodigies and their ideas that would allow them to be astronauts, but I’m a bit skeptical of these results. Sure, they make for great clickbait and feel-goodry (just embrace your inner child, ignore the pressures of society and you might be able to qualify to go the moon!) but have you spent any time with a five year old recently?
My colleague has a son about this age: this past weekend he linked together a Barrel of Monkeys to create a ladder for his green army men to climb.
Not only is this adorable, but it’s an amazing example of out-of-the-box creative thinking. But real world application? Maybe not so much. (Though I’m having a fantastic time imagining this scenario!)
Fewer synapses = fewer monkeys?
Young children have amazing brains: they develop literally trillions of neural synapses in the first few years of life. Then, through a process called synaptic pruning, those connections decrease over time, as some of these synapses are used and others aren’t.
In other words, kids connect all sorts of weird things together in their minds because they haven’t learned that these things don’t necessarily go together yet. This ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated things—also called divergent thinking—is an important tennant in creative thinking. But it’s just one part of it. And probably why I’m not quite ready to trust the Space Program to child geniuses just yet.
But this highlights an important question:
How do we test for creativity?
The original creativity tests developed in the 1960s are tests of divergent thinking. A couple examples of these include alternative uses (how many different ways can you think of to use a paperclip; the number and originality of your ideas impact your score) and incomplete figure tests where you’re given a line on a paper and asked to finish the drawing (uncommon subject matter, implied stories, humor and originality earn high marks).4
Other researchers have tried to measure creativity through self-reported creativity questionnaires and social-personality approaches (where they look at a mix of other personality traits and try to find a “formula” for a creative person). Both of these methods have some inherent biases.
So while divergent thinking tests have been criticized, they are currently the most accepted measure of creativity. (Though I’m very curious to see where the neuroscience takes us.)
Why should you care about creativity?
I hope I’m not being to presumptuous when I say everyone wants to develop new skills or grow their abilities. (Who wouldn’t want to be a faster runner or a better poker player?) But we all have limited hours in the day, so you can’t practice to get better at everything. Why is creativity one of those skills you should spend time developing?
Well, if you care about your career, it’s probably worth the investment. Both individuals and businesses value hold those with creative qualities in high regard. According to a survey by Adobe, people that identify as creative earn 17% more money than those who don’t. Similarly, in a survey of 1,500 CEOs, IBM found that creativity is the number one trait needed for business success.
And yes, the data from these surveys is based on opinion or self-reported creativity levels, but even if the scientists might squawk, it’s probably worth paying attention to. Basically, your boss and your boss’ boss both think creativity is important. And that makes sense as the definition of a creative person is literally someone who comes up with good ideas and can bring them to fruition. In today’s world, that is exactly the fuel that drives business success. So if you want to get ahead, start churning out those ideas like a barrel of monkeys. (Am I doing it right?)
Can you become more creative?
Absolutely! Creativity isn’t a magical gift bestowed to just a few lucky individuals, it’s a skill that you can hone and develop. The trick is figuring out how to flex your creativity muscles.
Article 3: 25 Ways to Be More Creative
https://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/25-ways-to-be-more-creative.html
Feel like you lack imagination? Know this: Everyone can be more original–it just takes practice.
You might think of creativity as something clever marketers or copywriters whip out when they need to come up with a compelling ad, or a personal trait only certain people, such as successful serial entrepreneurs or brilliant improv actors, naturally possess. But according to Keith Sawyer, research psychologist and author of “Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity,” everyone can be more creative just by taking eight incremental steps, but not necessarily in linear order. His path to creativity is more back and forth, a process in which the steps to greater imagination and originality build on and feed off each other
The book is a gem, chock full of fascinating findings from research studies and a deep well of tactics that will get you thinking differently. In fact, Sawyer advocates what is likely a radical shift in mindset for most people. Coming up with good ideas isn’t something we leave until there’s a pressing need. Rather, it’s is a skill that can be practiced daily to solve life’s problems as well as discover its opportunities.
Here are his steps for cultivating creativity, along with a sampling of tips that can help you along the way.
√ Ask the right question.
Sawyer tells the stories of the beginnings of Starbucks and Instagram. Neither company would be what it is today if its founders had continued to try to solve the original questions they sought to answer. Instead of asking “How can I recreate the Italian espresso bar in the United States?” Howard Shultz eventually looked at what wasn’t working with that idea to instead ask “How can I create a comfortable, relaxing environment to enjoy great coffee?” And while Kevin Systrom originally pondered how he could create a great location-sharing app, a better question turned out to be “How can we create a simple photo-sharing app?”
Sawyer offers plentiful techniques for generating lots of questions.
- Quickly, without overthinking it, write 10 variations of the same question. For example, for the classic question “How can I build a better mousetrap,” you might ask questions such as “How do I get the mice out of my house?” and “What does a mouse want?” or “How can I make my backyard more attractive to a mouse than my house?” One of your new questions will likely be a better one than your original.
- Debug your life. Brutally criticize an imperfect product or situation you come in contact with every day. Once you have a list, think of ways to eliminate the annoyances. This can amp creativity because little problems are often symptoms of bigger ones. Steve Jobs, a genius innovator, excelled at finding bugs that distracted from a user’s experience of a product.
- Make something then reinterpret it. Sometimes before you get at the right question, you have to make something. Once you do, think of your creation being used for purposes other than your original intent. This process throws away your first assumptions, forcing you to consider new perspectives.
√ Become an expert.
You have to become an expert in an area before you can be creative in it. “Successful creators don’t just like knowledge, they thirst for it. They can’t stop asking questions, and they always go beyond what they’ve learned from teachers and books,” Sawyer writes. There are a plethora of methods to do this.
- Listen to TED talks. They’re free videos of inspiring, funny, or fascinating speeches made by brilliant people. To get started, check out 6 TED Talks Every Entrepreneur Should Watch.
- Use all your senses to thoroughly delve into a subject. Let’s say you want to learn about the town of Mystras, Greece. You could learn some of the Greek language, search for photos of the Peloponnese online, cook some of its traditional food, watch videos of its traditional festivals, stream its local radio, and email an innkeeper there to get insider information about what the town is really like.
- Get a mentor. Nearly all Nobel Prize winners have them.
√ Be open and aware.
Creative people are always on the lookout for possible solutions. You can do this by becoming more aware and practicing mindfulness, which involves intentionally noticing things and not pegging people you meet based on your expectations or the categories you have established in your minds. Instead, try to be open and curious and resist stereotyping people.
- Create your own luck. Researchers have found people who describe themselves as lucky tend to notice things more than self-described unlucky people. They also act on unexpected opportunities and network well with others because they’re curious. Unlucky people tend to be tense and so focused on narrow goals that they miss opportunities.
- Don’t let accidents annoy you. Plenty of inventions–such as Penicillin, The Slinky and chewing gum–came into being because someone didn’t brush past an accident, but studied it instead.
- Play with children’s toys. Playing children are really good at making new connections. “I’m not the least bit self-conscious about my toy collection,” Sawyer writes. “If you walk into just about any supercreative company, you’ll find toys all over the place.”
√ Play and pretend.
When you play, your mind can wander and your subconscious has time to work. This is why time off from work is necessary for creativity to bloom.
- Explore the future. Imagine yourself being wildly successful five years from now. Write down as many details about what this success looks like. Then write the history of how you got there asking yourself questions such as, “What was the first step you took to move toward your goal?” or “What was one early obstacle and how did you move past it?”
- Leave something undone. If at the end of the day you leave a task slightly unfinished it may be easier to start on the next day. That’s because cognitive threads are left hanging in your mind and as you go about your non-work activities your subconscious might hook onto them and give you a sudden insight.
- Become a beginner. Learn how to do something new, such as Hula-Hooping, juggling, carving wood, or archery.
√ Generate lots of ideas.
This is the part where you come up with ideas, and lots of them.
- List unusual uses for common household objects. What are lots of different ways you could use a paper clip, brick, or knife? Give yourself five minutes to come up with a long list. Don’t worry about whether your ideas are stupid or not.
- Try toppling. This is where you use free association to keep generating new words. The trick, though, is to use a different kind of connection between each one. For example, if you start with “carrot” you can’t free associate another vegetable; instead, you might pick “stick,” as in the phrase “carrot and a stick,” then “glue” because you’re thinking of a glue stick. Another example: “Rock” might lead to “Scotch” because you drink it on the rocks.
- Set an idea time. Block out a regular time when you’re sharp, relaxed, and undistracted. Julia Cameron, author of popular self-help book “The Artist’s Way” suggests taking 30 minutes each morning to freewrite in a journal. As you do, you’ll notice new ideas creeping in.
√ Fuse ideas.
This involves combining things that don’t normally go together. In a recent study British neuroscientist Paul Howard-Jones asked people to create stories by giving them only three words. To one set of people the words were related, such as “brush,” “teeth,” and “shine.” Another set of people received unrelated words such as “cow,” “zip,” and “star.” The people who received the unrelated words made up more creative stories.
- Make remote associations. Go to page 56 in two different books and find the fifth sentence on each. Now create a story that tells the connection between the two.
- Use analogy. Find similarity between two things that on the surface seem different. Find something that’s removed from your problem, then define five structural properties of it. Instead of listing “sharp” or “metal” for a knife, for example, you’d want to identify things like “requires downward pressure to cut.” How can these characteristics apply to whatever you’re trying solve?
- Engage with people who are different from you. We hang out with people who are like us, and while doing so may be comforting, it’s not stretching. Also try imagining yourself as someone else–such as a chef, a foreign student, a building inspector. How would such people see the world?
√ Choose the best ideas.
If you’ve followed the first six steps, you should have plenty of ideas. Now the trick is picking the best ones.
- Know what you’re looking for. To do that, you need to trust your intuition–the sense that an idea has beauty. Sawyer also recommends going with ideas that are simple, elegant, and robust (the latter referring to a design that will keep working under adversity or if used improperly).
- Make ideas compete against each other. Select two of them and define how they’re different, even in the most subtle ways. Or if you have more than 50 ideas write each one on a sticky note or index cards. Move ideas that seem related close together. You’ll arrive at idea clusters and can look at interesting differences between ideas; perhaps they all vary along the same dimension.
- Look past the good. Once you’ve decided an idea is a good one, identify its pros and cons, assign each one a number between one and 10 according to how important it is. The pro total should be significantly higher than your tally for cons. You should also think of the worst-case scenario. What terrible things might happen to foil the success of your idea?
- Never stop editing. Everything can always be made better. Find a devil’s advocate to come up with a bunch of reasons why your idea is a bad one. Or, ask people you trust will be honest with you to look critically at your idea. And even failed ideas can be repurposed. The Post It, Sawyer points out, was the result of an adhesive that didn’t work very well.
√ Make something out of your great ideas.
Sawyer holds up the Silicon Valley design firm IDEO for its use of “design thinking,” which seeks to get simple versions of an idea into the world as early as possible–maybe in an hour or a day–by using simple materials such as clay or cardboard to give shape to a new concept. It’s a way of thinking through making, a process that often leads to more ideas.
- Draw a picture. Even if you think you can’t draw, you can at least doodle and no one ever has to see what you put to paper. Abstract problems–such as your relationship with someone or a crushing workload–benefit most from turning them into sketches. Cartooning with exaggerated shapes or using simple symbols helps.
- Make a collage. Grab a stack of magazines and look for photos and ads. Clip any that relate to your problem in any way and glue them to a large piece of poster board. Keep this art near your desk where you can ponder it. You may get a new perspective on your problem.
- Build something. Legos, Tinkertoys, an Erector Set, modeling clay, Silly Putty, and Play-Doh are all good materials you can use to build your idea. Sawyer himself keeps a bag of Legos in his briefcase for times when he has nothing to do.