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 