Creativity is an Operating System

Hey #Creative peeple! ✏️🎨🎤🎭🎸📸🪚🎞️💥🖍️🌈💡

Here’s the deal—if you don’t bake bread, you’re not a baker. Even if you can bake the best bread in the world, if you don’t make, bake and produce the bread, you’ll eventually lose that edge. I’m even going to go so far as to say that the knowledge of how to bake the bread is NOT the talent—the actual process of baking is where you become a baker. And even then, people need to eat your bread—taste and touch it—to know it’s the good stuff.

I believe this to be true of Creativity. For me, being “good” at creativity is an inherent talent (part of your intelligence set) but I also believe, like anything else, that hard work and tenacity increase your Creative Quotient (CQ). Creativity is not an activity or something that only happens in brainstorms or on Thursdays at noon. Creativity is not a switch to be turned on and off. Some of us may have a dial for our creativity and can occasionally crank it to 11, and creativity can be bolstered with learning, experiences, and knowledge, but being creative-first is more than that. It’s a way of life and an operating system for your soul.

Also, we must not confuse Creativity with Artistry. These are two different things, and we’ll speak to that in the next post. You don’t need to have an artistic talent to be good at creativity. To operate as a creative person is to operate in a world of wonder. It’s a mindset, where everything gets at least a glance. Where studying and analyzing and questioning the simplicities and intricacies of the world, to find different ways of seeing them is at the heart of this wonder. Perhaps, even seeing them in many ways at once. For a person who lives their life with creativity at the forefront of their mind, solutions are something they see all around them all the time. But, to reboot yourself into this mind-set you need to make that shift.

I’m never “not creative” but like moods, creativity can ebb and flow (see the term writer’s block) but if you’re always on, you’ll be more likely to manifest the solution to your problem, to "receive" it, per se. Always-on means you’re approaching everything with creativity. And creativity has no bounds. It has no borders. You may need to put some boundaries and borders onto your thinking because of timelines and budgets and all that stuff, but always go farther than you need. Let your ass hang out in the wind. It’s better to settle somewhere between boring and wild but you’ll never find that place until you’ve gone to the wild side. If you keep the same old boring thinking, than you’re just the same old boring you. You can do way more than that. I know it.

Here are some ways to shift your creativity and start to think differently.

🥰 Let empathy leak into your life. Maybe you’re a natural empath but if not, being able to “feel” (or at least acknowledge) the vibes of people, and even places and things, adds to your understanding of things which increases your pool of knowledge—a major source of solutions. Empathy is awesome to enhance your creativity.

🍴 Rearrange your silverware or junk drawer. This may seem silly, but these are things we don’t normally apply creativity to or even think about. Is your silverware or junk drawer the most efficient and creative display of storage? Try and come up with different ways of organizing those things. They don’t need to necessarily be better, but different. Better is in the eye of the beholder. Exercises like this are equivalent to repetitive writing to practice great penmanship. Practice makes perfect, right? At the very least practice will make you better.

🧐 Analyze everything. This may seem very scientific or like a chore but it’s not. Just look at things. The way a bird flies. How a traffic light operates. The rhythm of a railroad train. Find the harmony in things—break them down to their simplest forms. This may have nothing to do with what you do for a living. It doesn’t matter. The point is to grow more interesting neural connections.

🙋♀️ Question everything. A common statement which I hate more than bugs is, “That’s how we’ve always done it”. Why? Is it the best way? The most efficient? The most elegant or creative? Maybe it is, but that doesn’t mean that occasionally, you shouldn’t sit straight up and say “WTF?”.

Humans are inherently creative but regular life tends to want to beat that out of us. We'll say there isn’t time or I’m not in a creative mood or this project isn’t creative. That’s all BS. Creativity is a lifestyle and if you adapt to such, there’s always time, you’re always in the mood and everything is a beautiful challenge. Keep on keeping on.

Much energy and love.