Allow me to start by asking you a brief question. What is creativity? You might read for a couple of minutes while you figure out an answer. I did this exercise online, and I discovered hundreds of responses, and they were quite revealing.
As industries are evolving, at rapid speeds. Successful companies are asking for innovative ideas from their employees. Brilliant ideas are what can differentiate them in the market. Or even aid them to catch up with what their competitors are achieving.
Nowadays, creativity is near the top of most in-demand skills on the market. And the excellent news is, it’s a skill that everyone can improve at. Yet, creativity is a complex subject. It is surrounded by fluffy nonsense and spiritual woo hoo!
I want to prevent all that by debunking some common misunderstandings. Deceptions that can hold you back from your greatest idea-generating potential.
Creativity is a God-given ability
The first is that creativity is a God-given ability or a gift that some people own it and others don’t. Producing brilliant ideas is more about input than talent. If you don’t fill your mind with valuable input, you won’t have valuable output. Or as computer programmers would say, garbage in garbage out. So, don’t be a trash collector.
Creativity = Art
Another misunderstanding is that creativity equals art. I would say that art involves creativity. Imagination doesn’t need to involve anything artsy. Art has a significant role in society. But the feel of money and the key concept of modern democracy didn’t start as artistic projects. Some people also state you have to be a genius or an expert. This isn’t true. You need to have a level of knowledge to understand the problem and to generate ideas.
Expertise can work against you knowing too much about a subject. It CAN lock you into existing ways of doing things, and cause you to make too many assumptions. That’s destructive for ideas.
Creativity means to create something from a blank
Nothing comes out of the blue. Everything that we can imagine is influenced by social, cultural, and other key factors. Creative people perceive things from a diverse point of view. They bring brilliant ideas together in a new way that no one yet saw through.
The same rule applies to innovation. Long gone are the days of genius inventors.
Creatives now focus on improving something by utilizing what at present exists. Despite the will to make a change, not everyone has the same access to knowledge capacities.
Such a restriction doesn’t prevent creative people from offering a sustainable solution based on what they already have. This also debunks the myth that limitations harm creativity.
Creativity is a single skill and you can’t teach it
Let’s knock a final one on its head this time it’s the idea that creativity is a unique skill. It’s not. It’s a portfolio of lots of diverse skills. Collection from researching, organizing, remembering, imagining, analyzing, combining, judging. You are never equal in all of them. But that’s OKAY, it’s our differences. The result is alternative approaches. We should celebrate that.
Everybody has a creative potential that can be harnessed through activities at home, at work, or in any other environment.
Last words
Creativity represents the act of transforming our unknown and imaginative ideas into reality. Intelligent individuals rarely believe the first thing they overhear. Be smart and do not completely trust your humble surroundings. In a modern world where everyone is bombarded with information, such as the above myths are dispelled.
The most convenient way to preserve your conscious mind from such sentimental nonsense is to try to check everything in depth. Please, do it before building your final opinion about creativity.
