Tag: creativity

Deep dive in creativity

Neera

Below are ten things I find worth sharing this week.

  1. This week I explored creativity. From trying to figure out What is creativity, I explored Is being creative means being original, and shared the Seven Principles of Creative Living.
  2. “Creative is not a Noun” post by Austin Kleon is priceless. I recommend that if you do nothing else this week but find an hour to listen to his video you will have the magic formula you are looking for to unleash your creativity.
  3. Did you know that 72% of people have creative insights in showers? Or that trauma has hidden creative properties? 7 Surprising Facts about Creativity reveals how the brain’s creative circuitry holds some unexpected secrets that scientists are only just beginning to understand.
  4. The most impressive post on beloved writer Oliver Sacks’ Creative Process, his never-before-seen manuscripts, brainstorm sheets, and notes on writing, creativity, and the brain.
  5. My deep dive into understanding creativity got scientific with Your Brain on Creativity article on Psychology Today. Check it out, it might be a little heavy reading, but the conclusions or two scientific studies are priceless.
  6. How about this for an everyday story? A humble seven-year-old boy, Jack Berne, started Fiver for a Farmer campaign with his schoolmate with a goal to raise $20,000 for drought-stricken farmers has unexpectedly raised a massive $1 million.
  7. I found this inspiring story of a home cooking blogger who is replacing her lawyer income with a blogging income. Libby Hakim of Cooking with Nana shares how a series of four mini-breakthroughs led to her discovering how to replace her previous job as a lawyer with income from her blog.
  8. What is synaesthesia and what’s it like to have it?
  9. It is so accurate that it is almost freaky. I took this 16 Personalities test and finally found out why I do what I do. Try it, it is free.
  10. The book I am reading and immensely enjoying at the moment is Deep Work.

Seven Principles of Creative Living

Neera

Lawrence G Boldt, a writer, career consultant, and personal coach, gives seven principles for creative living in his book How to Be, Do or Have Anything:

1. Among human beings, creativity is a natural, and not an exceptional, trait. Birds fly, fish swim, and humans create.

2. For the individual, personal freedom and self-fulfillment depend upon the conscious expression of his or her innate creative capacities. Without such expression, one will meet with unhappiness and unnecessary limitation.

3. Social and psychological factors may limit or impede an individual’s innate creativity. These factors can be overcome.

4. The creative process follows a definitive pattern and is essentially the same for all outcomes.

5. The creative process is knowable and understandable. It can be taught and learned.

6. The more one creates, the more confident he or she becomes in his or her ability to create.

7. Experience gained in applying the creative process in one area of life can be transferred to other areas.

Is being creative means being original?

Neera

What is being creative mean to you?

If you think a creative is someone who creates something unique out of the blue, then you are as wrong as I was when I didn’t understand creativity.

Creativity is nothing more than a process. A process of creating something. From imagination to reality. From an idea to a tangible thing. We all create something all the time. That should be enough to make us all creatives.

But we don’t feel creative because we don’t think we are creating something ‘original.’ Because the literary definition of creativity is the “use of imagination or original ideas to create something new.”

Most of us get fixed on the idea of being original.

How to be original when everything has been done before? All story plots have been used endlessly, every emotion has been exploited, songs repeat themselves and there is no new way to paint the sky.

We get so obsessed with being original that we stop creating. We get frustrated because we can’t find a new way. All the time we are looking for a completely original way to do things.

This is where we are mistaken.

The true creators know there is nothing new under the sun. The concept has been best explained by Jobs, a genius in creativity. He writes in I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words.

“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

In a beautiful article for The Atlantic, Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity, writes:

“[C]reative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see. … Having too many ideas can be dangerous. Part of what comes with seeing connections no one else sees is that not all of these connections actually exist.“

James Webb Young offered the same point of view many years earlier:

“An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements [and] the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships.”

Creativity belongs to the artist in each one of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is to ‘fit together’ and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters, but we are all artists.

Each time we fit things together, we are creating—whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, or a day.

“This energy which we call “making” is the relating of parts to make a new whole. The result might be a painting, a symphony, or a building. If the job is done well, the work of art gives us an experience of wholeness called ecstasy—a moment of rising above our feelings of separateness, competition, and divisiveness “to a state of exalted delight in which normal understanding is felt to be surpassed.”

In this video, How to be Creative, a web series exploring art, internet culture, and people creating it, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson urges people to let go of this romanticized idea of “originality.”

He agrees ideas don’t actually come out of thin air; in your subconscious, you were still processing all these influences from memories, education, experiences, etc.

He also mentions that humans create new ideas by copying, transforming, and combining other ideas.

Artists take existing ideas that nobody would have thought of combining and connecting them; making them work.

So, in nutshell, creativity is nothing more than connecting pre-existing ideas into new ideas.

We all are capable of doing it.

What is creativity?

Neera

If you are going to live a creative life, it is better to understand what creativity is. 

The Oxford dictionary defines creativity as the “use of imagination or original ideas to create something.”

But this definition is in direct contradiction with a much more cited quote from the Bible: “There is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

If you need more of an artist’s definition, this one by Pearl S. Buck is quite up to the mark.

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god and failure is death.  Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create… so that without the creation of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”

Albert O. Hirschman spoke about the elusive nature of creativity.

“Creativity always comes in surprise to us; therefore, we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage in tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.”

Don Roff validated the fears of many of us with this quote.

“Regarding the creative: never assume you’re the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you’re masterful.”

Mary Oliver put in words why many of us never lead creative lives.

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

But it was Lady Gaga who put the finger on the pulse of creativity.

“When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time.”

Aunt Grace’s Philosophy

Neera

Many years ago I read a story that impacted me so much that I wrote it down in my journal. Recently, while going through old notebooks, I read it and it hit the cord in me again. I have to share it with you.

It originally appeared in Reader’s Digest.

The writer Nardi Reeder Campion describes a time in her life when she was down in the dumps and discovered a diary that had been kept more than forty years before by a maiden aunt who had gone through some bad times herself.

Aunt Grace had been poor, frail, and forced to live with relatives. “I know I must be cheerful,” she wrote, “living in this large family upon whom I am dependent. Yet gloom haunts me. Clearly, my situation will not change; therefore, I shall have to change.”

To help her hold her fragile world together, Aunt Grace resolved to do six things every day:

  • Something for someone else
  • Something for herself
  • Something she didn’t want to do that needed doing
  • A physical exercise
  • A mental exercise
  • An original prayer that always included counting her blessings

These six things help change Nardi’s life as they had helped change Aunt Grace’s life many years before

“Can life be lived by a formula?” Nardi asks herself in the article. “All I know is that since I started to live by those six precepts, I’ve become more involved with others and hence less ‘buried’ in myself.”

Ever since I read this story, Aunt Grace’s motto, ‘Bloom where you are planted’ has become my motto too.

Publishing a book doesn’t make you a writer

Neera

There is a misconception that all aspiring writers have. They are not willing to accept themselves as writers till they have published a book or an article or a short story. They are over the moon if their story wins an award because now they can call themselves a writer. There is proof now. Someone has published their story and given them an award.

But it is a fallacy.

You were a writer before your story got published. Weren’t you? You wrote the story first, then you sent it for publication.

And chances are you wrote a lot many stories before you sent one in a competition. I can bet my last dollar that you had written much more before you wrote those stories. A diary. A journal too maybe. Some poems. Occasional letters. You have written them and that makes you a writer. Then why don’t you call yourself a writer?

It comes down to acceptance. You are not willing to accept the value of your own work. You are looking for authentication from someone else. To give you permission to add the title of ‘writer’ in front of your name.

I have been writing for at least sixteen years now. It took me at least ten to call myself a writer in front of others. Like many aspiring writers, I failed to see that publishing a book doesn’t make you a writer. It makes you an author. And the two are separate terms. The writer is the one who writes, and the author is the one who publishes her writing. You become a writer first and then you become an author. So start calling yourself a writer. And when you publish your book, you can call yourself an author.

Use this philosophy to bury the critic inside you.

Focus on the ‘verb’ of writing and ‘noun’ will follow.

Write, and if you are writing, you are a writer.