This week, I have spent time reading "Wired to Create" by Scott Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire. I have always struggled with my personal creativity and I chose this book as a way to help me 'be more creative'. I am now believing that is impossible because, that is not how it works. I have been called creative a lot in my life, but I always thought that deep down I was not at all creative or that the things I produce were safe or simple...the opposite of creative. Were people just being nice? Am I really a creative person? These kind of questions stifle creativity and absorb it like a sponge. The problem, as I am coming to terms with it, is not my creativity, but it is my confidence in my creativity. My mind jumps around when I am trying to be creative. I bounce from idea to idea. I dismiss too quickly. My mind is messy.
Early thought on creativity was that it was a process that had 4 stages; Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification. This theory from the 1920's was way too simple for the complexity of creativity. In the 90's there was a surge in positive psychology that has sparked a boom in research on the good things, like creativity, in our messy little minds. There are over 20,000 books on Amazon about creativity and countless blogs and articles. The point is that with this explosion of interest and research we are finally getting somewhere when dealing with creativity.
One of my favorite lines in the book so far is that creativity is not a sum of characteristics, but a multiplication of them. In the 1960s, Frank Barron, did some research with highly creative people. One of his take aways was that all of the subjects scored very high on tests measuring mental strength and mental illness. This really peaked my interest and I can totally relate. The author went on to identify three super-characteristics of creative people; plasticity, divergence, and convergence. What? How can you be divergent and convergent at the same time? Probably the same way you can be mental strong and ill at the same time.
Another old notion about creativity is that it only comes from suffering. We all suffer. A common Buddhist saying is that every life is filled with 10,000 sorrows, and 10,000 joys. We all suffer and it is relative to the world that surrounds us. However, suffering is not related to creativity. For some it is an outlet for personal grief or a way of dealing with complex emotions, but has little to do with being creative. We are all creative. We are all wired to create. I think the problem is that we are not all encouraged to create or be creative and in the end the confidence in our personal creativity gets overshadowed and rarely comes to the surface.
It was a refreshing to read the first part of this book about the messy mind and creativity. I feel like that hit right at home. It gave me some confidence that my messy mind is, in fact, a key trait I have in common with some of the most highly successful and creative people in our history. Creativity is a messy business and putting it into categories, as it may help some with the need for organization, it does not help me be creative. Creativity is a super complex equation that you can not force or calculate, but you can stop it. My goal is to no longer let it be stopped.