What is Creativity?
Mel Rosenberg
© 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced without the author's express permission.
There is probably no universal definition for creativity. What is creative to one person may not seem at all creative to another. Nevertheless, in a broad sense, creativity involves doing or thinking something that is not ordinary, or doing or thinking of something in a way that is not ordinary.
Even among so-called 'creative people', their everyday lives mostly involve routine. Creative people still sleep in beds at night, eat breakfast in the morning, and work at day jobs. That is, in part, because man is an animal that needs routine. Our bodies are chemically regulated to wakefulness during daylight and sleep during darkness. Man is used to routine: the moon coming and going, seasons changing, and waking up to find the birds singing and the mountains nearby in the same place. Natural events that perturb the routine, such as eclipses, unexpected weather, volcanoes and earthquakes frightened primitive man and causing them to invent a series of supernatural deities who, when properly appeased, could get things back to 'normal'.
So who needs creativity? Well, for a large part, it is creativity that allowed mankind to 'conquer' the planet (with mixed consequences, one must admit). Mankind created languages for conversing at short distances. Mankind learned to create long distance messages and long-term records. Mankind learned to domesticate wild animals (it's hard to imagine that poodles and dachshunds were bred from fierce, wild wolves) and to grow plants (try to imagine the clever primitive man who realized that plants grow from their seeds). Mankind learned to transport goods and himself by sea, land and air. One person who definitely deserves the prehistoric Nobel prize is the fellow (or lass) who invented the wheel. Primitive wheels were little more than rolling logs, but they developed thousands of years ago into wheels that could carry goods and warriors. It is intriguing that the wheel was apparently never invented among the indigenous populations of North and South America (the Mayas, for example), although they were very advanced in other areas.
Creativity can also help individuals survive natural and man-made calamities. In a movie, a fleeing man suddenly disappears. Those who want to kill him cannot find him anywhere. He is actually hiding under the water, breathing through a straw he found in his pocket. When in dire trouble, those with the most creative solutions often survive.
In the animal kingdom, creativity takes a distant second place to physical prowess. The top (alpha) male is the one who gets the best food and the best 'chicks'. He is the toughest, fastest, strongest son of a bitch around. If not, he gets ousted by another male. Animals do not take up science or music. Mind you, humans can still get to the top based on their physical properties (football players such as Beckham, and supermodels come immediately to mind). But, in our modern society you can also be a myopic nerd yet rule the pack. Just ask the likes of Woody Allen and Bill Gates.
So, if you're a gorgeous blonde, or a handsome, muscular type, this article may or may not be what you require to make it to the top. But for the majority of us, creativity is an essential human tool in staying alive. Really alive
Young kids are really alive. And extremely creative. They learn by creating. They mix the unmixable. They match the unmatchable. They say the unspeakable. Young children aren't concerned about little silly. Just this morning a youngster told me, "I have an uncle from Thailand. He speaks Thailish."
Young children love to paint, dance and sing. They are not worried that they might 'sing off key' or colour 'outside the lines'. They just do it.
But then the same creative youngsters go off to school, where they are taught proper grammar and how to paint within the lines. We are taught to "conform". Actually, not much teaching is necessary, since children that behave differently are ostracized and ridiculed. Peer pressure becomes a very important social factor. Schools reinforce conformity because it is easier for them to encourage pupils to act the same and think the same, rather than to encourage each student to be creative and original. If all children wear the same uniform to school, there are less clothing issues. If each question has a single 'right' answer, then exams are much easier to grade.
To illustrate this point, pretend that you are in the eighth grade, consider the following question in mathematics. You have exactly one minute to solve it.
Matt drives a bicycle from his house to school in fifteen minutes. George walks at a speed of five kilometers an hour, and arrives fifteen minutes after George. How far is it from A to B?
Well, most people will probably arrive at an answer of 2.5 kilometers (if they started off together, then it took George thirty minutes, which is half an hour, which means he covered half of the five kilometres he would do in an hour). A pupil who answered this question would get it 'right'. Maybe we adults, who were wee pupils once, have been 'taught' that this straightforward approach is the correct and rewarding one.
However, there are actually many possible answers to this one question. Note that the question fails to tell us precisely when George started out. He may indeed have set off from home with Matt, but he might have started walking an hour earlier. In which case the answer would be 7.5 kilometers. Or he may have taken a different route altogether. Or he may have started out from a different place. Or he may have stopped to talk to friends, or to buy a comic book.. Probably, George and Matt travelled a distance greater than the direct distance between the two points. And so on.
Some people (my wife, for example) might have trouble answering these kinds of math questions. However, she is a poet and writer, and would have little problem providing several more imaginative answers to explain why Matt drove his bike and George walked in the first place.
To many questions in life, there is no 'right' answer. In many cases, the more creative solutions are better than the ones that would score '100' in school. But we are conditioned by our school education to look for the answer that conforms best.
Inventors are always looking for a new way to do an old thing. Or a new thing. Or both. They look for questions no one has asked, and for answers that still need questions. Creative people retain their 'inner child' and are young at heart. I remember over twenty years ago, soon after joining the staff of my faculty, the administrative director once chastised me for being so 'childish'. I thanked her for the compliment and left her office with a wide grin. As a creative individual, I know that as long as I keep fighting to be creative, I can't grow old.
When creative people succeed, they are elated. When they do not, they often fight until they do achieve at least some of their goals. But, succeed or not, they feel fresh and challenged. They do not lead mundane existences. They do not pass through GO to collect $200. They do not 'go gentle into that good night'. Life does not pass them by.
Some people are able to achieve fame and make a good living being creative. A short list would include successful writers, artists, musicians, copyrighters and inventors. Not all creative people are rich and famous. Many artists and musicians barely get by. Inventors are often perceived as being successful and rich, but most lose money: only one in 100 inventions eventually leads to a successful new product or process. For many artists and musicians and some serial inventors, it appears as if they have a compulsive creativity gene. They cannot envision living their life without their music and art. Innovation and art literally burst out of them.
So how does one go about being creative? How does one go about being innovative, having fresh ideas, thinking new thoughts? It's not that difficult. If we think about, as humans we are all creative at least once in a while. We make decisions all the time. The question is how many of these decisions lie outside of our routine?
I have listed below what I think are friends and foes of the creative process. You'll notice that I have made only one list, as friends of creativity can sometimes be foes, and vice versa.
Friends and foes of creativity:
- Laziness
- Curiosity and Interest - an inquisitive mind
- Energy and Motivation
- Routine, convention, tradition
- Desire for change
- Education
- Reward
- Logical thinking
- Choice
- Time
Lazyness is the mother of invention. Often when we tire of some chore, we look for an easier way to do it. One of my problems in life has been that my shoelaces tend to get undone. I was so fed up with having to tie my laces again and again that I came up with a way to tie my shoes so that they don't undo. [I thought that I was the only person in the world to come up with this small invention, but recently found that a friend of mine from Germany had come up with the very same method for the very same reason!].
My very first 'invention' was directly the consequence of laziness and a related phenomenon, i.e. pain aversion. I was eighteen years old, working on a kibbutz, and my onerous task was scraping the leaves and debris from the bases of hundreds of lemon trees. Now, to get close to the base of the lemon tree, you have to crawl in under the branches on your knees, susceptible to the slings and arrows of outrageous thorns. It was a complete pain. My idea was to get a high speed air hose with a handle with which to blow away the debris. After I left the kibbutz (with sore knees I assure you), they implemented the idea and used it for years after I left.
Of course lazy people are often too lazy to invent anything, and spend their free time drinking beer and watching television.
Curiosity and inquisitiveness are prerequisites for the inventive process. People who are curious wonder and ask questions. How does this thing work? Why does it work like that? Couldn't it work like this? Curious people haven't lost that knack that every toddler has - the desire to try to figure everything out, making innumerable steps along the way.
Of course, being curious isn't enough. There are lots of people who are curious, and want to know everything, but are content to learn, without the desire, motivation, or guts to try to change the way things are.
The famous adage, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again", holds for many inventors and innovators who just didn't give up (the Wright brothers come immediately to mind). Thinking takes energy. Trying new things out takes even more. And fighting the people who are used to doing things 'their way' (even when yours is much better) takes a lot of energy. And motivation.
On the other hand, many energetic people never invent anything. They are too busy doing routine things….energetically.
Routine, convention, tradition
As I mentioned earlier, adults are first and foremost, creatures of routine. We are used to where we live, our jobs, what we eat, how we dress. We resist major changes. Innovations that seek to change the way we do something are either doomed to failure, or take decades to gain acceptance. Remember that the television was invented before 1930, yet started became popular only in the 1950s. The list goes on and on: ballpoint pens, ECG, water fluoridation, fax machines, cellphones.
Routine seems to be a prime enemy of innovation. "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" Why not go on doing the same things we've done for years, in exactly the same way? Innovators try to break ranks with routine ways of doing things, suggesting ways of doing things that are faster, cheaper, better, safer.
Interestingly, routine also helps to promote innovation. Many inventors find that they invent things while doing routine activities. My best thinking is done when I am doing routine things, rocking my children to sleep, washing the dishes, exercising. Somehow, routine activities open up your mind to novel thinking processes.
The words tradition and convention also conjure up tendency to resist change. But they can sometimes spur innovation. Just think of the amazing works of art that Christianity has spawned almost from its outset. Or consider the artistic traditional Moslems and Jews who, barred by religious laws from drawing graven images, were forced to develop new art forms.
We come to the interesting conclusion that frameworks seem to be part of the creative process. To write, you need a framework (a language). Creative writing involves using the language in a novel way. Languages have a limited number of words, but the words can be juxtaposed in countless ways. To play music, you play within the framework of a musical instrument. Each musical instrument has its limitations, and one must either play and compose within these limitations, or challenge the boundaries (for example, to strum on a piano's keys for a harp effect, or bang on it for rhythm, as opposed to a drum). Note that once the boundaries are extended, they become new boundaries. Once someone has played Beethoven on a pink Steinway, others can only follow suit.
What drives the desire of innovators and creative people to do novel things? Often the incentive is money. Just as often the perk is fame and adulation. Perhaps the payoff is the physiological 'rush' that long distance runners, scuba divers and mountain climbers experience, when pushing their physical limits. As any successful scientist can tell you, the ecstacy of discovering something is profound, and addictive.
Desire for change
A lot of the secret of being creative has to do with our emotional state. Basically, in order to do anything that isn't ordinary, we have to want to. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him tap dance. Some people are content to leave ordinary lives. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, just as there is nothing necessarily right about being creative. It's just a state of being in which you can choose to do the unexpected. I don't think that being creative is inherently good, as people can sometimes choose to do the nastiest things in a creative way.
The issue is that many people would like to be more creative. Such people are motivated to change. Perhaps, however, they are afraid.
Being afraid when things are not normal is, well, quite normal. Any time someone does something out of the ordinary, some degree of fear is warranted. It keeps us from doing the really crazy things (sometimes, when we aren't afraid of new situations, we do dangerous things. I have almost drowned twice, swimming in unfamiliar places without lifeguards. Or the time I got lost in a bad section of downtown Brussels at one in the morning wearing a suit and carrying thousands of dollars in my pocket. But being afraid is also part of being alive and feeling alive. And doing new things has a habit of making us feel more vital, more alive.
Education and Knowledge
I've talked about education above, and won't elaborate further, except to say that education in schools often interferes with creativity, the same way that mass production of bread compromises its taste. What about knowledge? Knowledge, is a very important component of the creative process. Without knowing how to do something competently, we are handicapped. It's hard to build a rocket without knowing physics and engineering. It's equally difficult to prepare a canvas for an oil painting without having the foggiest idea how to go about it. Knowledge, how broad and intensive, cannot take the place of intuition.
Further, knowledge cannot be taken as rote. What we 'know' today is often supplanted or supplemented by further information.
My first marketed invention was a disposable device for inoculating microorganisms on agar plates. My friend and colleague, Ervin Weiss, a dentist, wanted to become a microbiologist. I was teaching him how to inoculate plates using the technique which I was taught as a student. When he asked me why I was doing it in that particular way, my first response was a laconic "Ervin, microbiologists have been doing it this way for almost 100 years". But he demanded a better reply. On second thought I realized that he had a point there, and we ended up inventing a new inoculating device, the QuadLoop.
Reward
Unfortunately for us, QuadLoops cost only about 2 cents each, so we never made any serious money, although many millions are sold each year. However, as my friend Ron correctly points out, money is not the sole issue. Painters like to exhibit their paintings. Musicians like to have an appreciative audience. Public recognition and private contentment due to a successful innovation is often more important than financial remuneration.
Luck and Timing
Luck is the critical element in success. It cannot be predicted (otherwise it's not luck), but it can be harnessed. Or, to quote others, "Chance favors the prepared mind". Many inventions are come upon by happenstance (remember the famous legends of Archimedes and Newton, and the chance discovery of penicillin by Fleming). These observations did not fade into oblivion, but were noticed and acted upon by creative individuals.
Timing is just as important. Most people will cite Da Vinci's invention of the submarine, hundreds of years before it could be built. But my favourite example is the invention of the saxophone by Adolph Sax, some eighty years before this marvellous instrument found its true calling – in twentieth century jazz. Some people are just way ahead of their time.
Summary
Not everyone has the genes and motivation to be a Michaelangelo, Mozart, or Edison. We won't all be famous, but each of us can put a little more creativity into our lives. Actually, anytime we have a choice, we can be creative. We can choose to cook up a dish with a new twist for dinner. We can send a creative birthday card. We can dress with flair the next time we go out. In the next chapter, we'll discuss creativity in our everyday lives.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Ron Klein for his comments and insight during preparation of this chapter.
