Last week, Newsweek ran an article all about creativity. It’s about how creativity is declining in America, and it also includes a lot of recent research and theories about creativity and learning creativity. Interesting stuff. Especially interesting for me, because reading this article really brought my personal misconceptions about creativity into the spotlight.
I was a creative child: I excelled at creative writing in school, I engaged in the sorts of play described in this article as being associated with high creativity on a daily basis, I daydreamed and devoured books whole, I loved composing as well as playing music, etc. My greatest desire from age seven on was to be a writer – a desire I relinquished once it was made clear to me how impractical a career course this was.
What interests me is that until quite recently, I never valued my own creativity particularly highly. I valued my intelligence, yes, my organizational skills, my memory, my problem-solving skills, and my analytical and synthesis skills. But I would have never stated that one of my core strengths was creativity.
Why is this? Two reasons, I think. First, I was never taught that creativity was useful for anything except artistic pursuits, ie the arts. And second, I was taught that the arts as a whole are impractical and therefore the skills associated with them aren’t as valuable as other skills.
That’s a loaded paragraph, isn’t it? Imagine believing the two assertions made above, and then reading the following from Newsweek’s article:
The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.
The mind boggles as reason number one (creativity is only useful in the arts) is shredded into tiny pieces. Let’s throw away my faulty understanding and look at my two reasons in this new light, shall we?
- Creativity is an extremely useful and adaptive skill that when applied, can lead to innovative and *practical* solutions to an entire host of problems. Ah ha! Maybe this is why I excelled at starting and running my own business, or how I found ways to travel around the world on an extremely limited budget, or why coming up with multiple solutions to a small problem seems trivial to me while to others it appears to be a struggle.
- Even if one accepts as true that the arts are inherently impractical(1), they are, at the very least, the perfect training ground to foster and train the valuable “leadership competency” of creativity. Not that there aren’t other ways to train this skill, but the arts are certainly a very obvious path.
I don’t think I’m the only one who used to believe creativity’s practicality was limited. I remember in college speaking to a creative friend of mine who told me that everyone had told him to enter an advertising firm, because “that’s where creative people go to work if they want to make money.” At the time, I believed this assertion completely. The choice as laid out for me was to either enter the arts and eschew a stable future, or sell out and work in advertising.
Think what creative people could accomplish if, instead of being presented with this false dichotomy, they were educated in where their real strengths lie: solving problems, thinking outside of the box, coming up with multiple solutions and combining them for maximum positive effect, analyzing systems to figure out what change would have the most impact. Starting nonprofits, increasing communication between disparate groups, disseminating powerful ideas that grow to influence communities, decision makers, and potentially entire societies. Inventing innovative machines, systems, gadgets, more efficient ways of accomplishing a task.
It’s fine to choose the arts in the face of this knowledge. I have no regrets about my choice. But when I’m told that the United States prizes creativity, I have to call foul. If that’s true, why wasn’t I told what my creativity meant? Why wasn’t I told what I could accomplish? Why did no one mention the possibility that I could make the world a better place with my creativity even if I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body?
If there is a creativity “crisis” in this country right now, it’s because creativity as a skill hasn’t been valued nearly enough.
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(1.) This idea is founded on one basis only: the reality that a career in the arts can be unstable from a financial perspective. We see here the shadows of my upbringing telling me the most important criteria for determining an activity’s value is in its money-producing capability (and as a corollary, its relative stability). Never mind for the moment that I know many working artists who do quite well, or that I myself was able to found a successful business completely based on, you guessed it, the arts. This also overlooks the possibility, a reality for many, of the day job as a support for serious pursuit of the arts. Or the choice to pursue the arts due to other intrinsic values, and financial stability be damned.
The Practical Free Spirit 
I was honestly shocked when you told me about this first thing that you were taught. I always saw (and was taught) intelligence as being a tripos: creativity, the ability to assimilate new knowledge quickly, and the self-discipline to do something with it. Creativity was the sine qua non of the three; given discipline you can make up for learning more slowly, and given fast enough learning you can fake around a certain lack of discipline, but all of the “useful” kinds of intelligence basically boil down to the ability to take an unfamiliar problem and think of something new.
I do remember seeing a lot of people tagged as “intelligent” in school because they had a lot of facts memorized, or could regurgitate well on tests. It seemed strange to me as a kid, and even more so when I started to teach; that skill had pretty much no correlation with any ability to “actually think,” and people who had that skill without genuine intelligence — in the creativity sense — tended to stop being considered “smart” the moment they left the artificial environment of school. Because frankly, being an information storage depot isn’t a useful skill if you can’t use it, and if I need an encyclopaedia, I know where to find one.
So I’m surprised, and rather angry, that nobody ever told you this. Creativity is the heart and soul of intelligence; all of the other stuff is just details.
One more thought, about creativity and the arts. The arts are certainly based around creativity, but (as you said) it’s really important to remember that creativity is at the heart of many other things. I’ve seen plenty of people whose creativity manifests itself in building things of practical value; certainly not “fine art” by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that it requires no less creativity. I’ve also seen it manifest in people building enormous thought-edifices like scientific theories or mathematical structures; not exactly an art you can easily share with the masses, but every time I see artists and scientists talk about their work I’m struck by the similarities in the ways they describe their process.
So I think that not only should creativity (and its versatility) be more emphasized, as you said, but there’s good reason to focus less on the differences between the kinds of creativity, and allow people to manifest creativity in whichever forms best suit their interests and talents. No more of this “you’re creative, you have to be an artist,” and no more “you’re an engineer, you can’t be creative;” both of these are poisonous.
I realize I’m getting into more contentious ground here. 🙂
I don’t think it’s contentious ground at all; I can think of no more creative endeavors – besides the arts themselves – than science and mathematics. And I’m a pretty creative guy.
The big, important note in this blog post, I believe, is that creativity is a skill; it is learn-able. It involves methods of thinking that are do not always follow straight linear progressions, and do not involve the simple regurgitation of facts. Nearly anyone can learn it, more or less easily dependent on their mindset. When performed rigorously, creativity is true intelligence, and if nearly anyone can learn to do it then nearly anyone can become truly intelligent.
If nothing else, the US should get behind teaching creativity just for my last line alone; creativity can make everyone smart(er). In a country that is also about egalitarianism, what could be more fundamental than that opportunity for all its citizens?
Here I would sometimes let myself spiral into a rant about the devaluation of intelligence in the States, but I shall forgo that tonight in favour of more creative pursuits like writing a short story.
You have anticipated my next post. 🙂 Unless, of course, I get distracted, which has been known to happen….
Yes, I think it’s very important to remember that creativity is involved in all sorts of thinking, problem solving, and careers, not just artistic ones. It’s unfortunate that our society seems to value artistic endeavor less than most other undertakings, but it would be even more unfortunate to continue to ignore creativity because of the association between the two.
What a great post. Gave me a lot to think about. I wish I was taught to value creativity while growing up, but like you, creativity was another word for artist — and it had nothing to do with academics. I thought that IBM poll was really interesting.
Me too! I feel like a lot of things I’ve been thinking about recently came together for me while reading the Newsweek article and hearing about the IBM poll. I’m hoping maybe this is a sign that the trend will shift towards more value being placed on creativity in the future.
The Wikipedia article on creativity has a lot of interesting information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity
I particularly like the section on Graham Wallas’s five stage process, as it mirrors my experience with the creative process, and highlights the need for a lot of preparation (you have to “prime” your mind with the material to combine into original ideas).
I was taught, like Yonatan, that intelligence required will (self-discipline), creativity and adaptability (the ability to assimilate new information quickly). I actually think that self-discipline might be the most contentious of the three criteria, since there is a popular archetype of the “genius slacker”. I’m having trouble coming up with a good example of a popular archetype of a “non-creative genius”. Maybe Spock from Star Trek? But his solutions to hard problems are generally very creative and out of the box. Adaptability has always seemed, to me, like the hallmark of intelligence (since it is present even in uneducated, “intelligent” people), so I really can’t come up with a popular archetype of a “non-adaptable genius”. The closest I can think of is Einstein in his later years being unable to reconcile with the fundamental weirdness of quantum physics.
Hmm, I hadn’t remembered the “creative genius” phrase. The idea of creativity feeding into intelligence is not a particularly counter-intuitive one, and I’m glad to hear that my experience of not connecting the two is not universal.
Also, I definitely agree with the self discipline aspect. I’ve always thought genius slackers were over-rated…. or backed by someone willing to do the necessary hard work. 🙂
Hear hear! Just one of the disconnects between what we say our nation needs and how we educate our children.
You are so awesome! I do not believe I’ve truly read through a single thing like this before.
So nice to find another person with some genuine thoughts on this subject.
Seriously.. many thanks for starting this up. This website is something
that’s needed on the internet, someone with some originality!