50 Shades of Creativity
One March, when I was in my 6th grade, I remember the class teacher walked into our class and asked everyone, “All of you who are creative and can draw and paint, please give your names to me so I can include you in the annual event preparation”. I would be lying if I said that the almost-teenage me didn’t feel a pang of disappointment. I could not paint or draw and so I told myself that I wasn’t creative and so couldn't participate. Over the years, across multiple family get togethers and school annual events, my brain was conditioned to believe that creativity was about arts and craft, it was about composing music, theatre or choreography. All of this meant I wasn’t creative.
If only I had looked up in the dictionary for the meaning of the word creative I would have known that it is defined as: Relating to or involving the use of the imagination or original ideas to create something. Somebody thought of rubbing two rocks together to give us fire. And somebody else thought of attaching round wooden components with spokes in them to a compartment to create the horse drawn carriage. In fact, the world we see today has been shaped by people who thought ‘why not?’. And all of those individuals were creative.
People reading this, if you’ve known me long enough, you’d agree with me that going by the above definition - I am also creative!
However, I am not the only victim of this wrong definition of creativity. Across multiple workshops I have asked my participants to raise their hand if they thought they were creative and only 30-35% would raise their hands. The rest would respond with:
- I am a financial analyst, I am not creative
- I cant draw a straight line, I am definitely not creative
- I always got an F in school for craft and I cannot be detail-oriented, so I am not creative
- And the most common one was , I am a left brain person and so not creative!
Guess what all of you people - you are all wrong! If you can solve a problem using the means available with you, YOU ARE CREATIVE!
Look at these below pictures - dont you agree that each of these individuals are creative?
Busting the myth!
One of the most common misconceptions when it comes to human creativity is the left brain-right brain theory that associates the left hemisphere of our brain with logic and analytics and the right side of our brain with art, music and ‘creativity’. This conditioning is exactly what has allowed our society, as a whole, to determine what creativity is and it’s time we bust that myth.
Creativity is not associated with the left or right brain. It is a form of thinking, not a form of being. All 7 billion of us are creative, just that we have forgotten how to use that muscle of ours. It is only a matter of shattering the glass ceiling in our minds that has not allowed us to explore our creative thinking capabilities. Creativity comes in different shades and like every other muscle in our body, needs regular workout.
In the last quarter I have taken multiple creative thinking sessions and it’s amazing to see how the participants get this amazing high when it dawns on them that they are creative. The exercises are so simple and intuitive that it becomes like this great tool that they keep it handy for when they need it. Just remember:
- if you are the kind who usually seek different ways to solve a problem, you are creative
- if you find yourselves asking intriguing questions, you are creative
- if you constantly find yourself getting lost in this imaginary world, you are creative
- if you wonder 'why not', you are creative
And as for me, I wish I could go back in time and tell my 12-year old self that I am a creative problem solver and would have urged to use my imagination and ideation skills to create a better set for the Ramayana play. Of course the fact that I could then miss classes to hang out with friends would have been a bonus!
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3yNice one Reshma, and we definitely need more people like you enthusiastically educating people that everyone of us can and should be tapping into their creative side! I'm current obsessed with 'co-creation'. It has numerous benefits, but a key one (that ties into creativity), is that people naturally build off one another when solving a problem or visualising a solution. And it's a great way for the self-described non-creatives to get drawn in and automatically start throwing out ideas of their own, to build off the other person's ideas. (And it's typically more fun!) And we really need to educate people that when it comes to creativity, it's often quantity over quality, at least in the beginning. Throwing out as many ideas as possible, simply increases the chances that one of those raw ideas can evolve into the winning idea.
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3ySo true, Reshma, creativity is part of our human nature and needs to be developed and fueled. I hope you have the chance to use your creativity today for the Ramayana play😉
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3yReshma Budhia you are definitely creative! There is confusion between "creative" and "artistic". I was leading an offsite with a startup and we were discussing the various values it wanted to adapt — one of them was creativity. I believe that just throwing values out there is not effective and it is important to discuss how these values look like in everyday decisions and actions. We were going around pondering the question "How will this value apply to me?" One of the accountants said “Creativity? I don’t know, I am not a creative person’. So, I opened it up to the group and a bunch of people jumped in— "What do you mean you are not creative? You figured out how to get us all paid while we still did not have an accounting system!’ and other examples like this — her eyes welled up with tears and it was a beautiful moment.
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3yGood one Reshma 😀, the very fact that u r using this platform to burst the myth is part of you which is creative enough to know what and how to do it 😀