Today everybody talks about creativity but let's analize what true creativity is about in order to discover a bit more about this wonderful manifestation of the human being.
With tend to associate creativity with a moment of ilumination, that moment in which one exclaims "Eureka!", but that's not something that appears suddenly from nowhere, in reality this is preceded by persistent thinking on a given topic and a lot of daydreaming. It's important to take into account here that ilumination on itself is not yet a creative act, even if we are referring to a great discovering or a revelation; the final stage is translating that big idea into action so it becomes useful for oneself and for others.
But originality and usefulness are not enough, in fact an important dimension of creativity is the existence of the public, the way in wich a creative effort is received makes the difference, and if we talk about making an impact that public must be the appropiate one, specialized.
Against the common opinion these days creativity is not a single skill that a person can use in every activity, creativity is not like a fluid that can flow in any direction, no, the physical explanation of this fact is that the brain have different areas or intelligences, like the mathematical, linguistic, spatial or musical. Therefore one can be very creative solving problems with regularity in a particular area but not in others. Creative people is permanently thinking on their field, they live asking: What make sense here and does not make sense? and if this makes no sense what can I do for changing it?.
We can think of creativity like cooking, there are different ingredients: the main one is expertise in a specific area, ability; the second one is flexibility and a openmind, this includes imagination of different possibilities and the courage to accept taking risks; and the ingredient that cooks all is passion, this is, inner motivation, the impulse of making something for the mere pleasure of making it, rather than for any external premiun or compensation.
There are also other elements that we need to take into account on this analysis, for instance it's recommended to look to common things in a new way, it's vital to question things. It's good to have some degree of innocence, of naivety and the eyes wide open, the reason is that if you know too much about the errors in the past and have too many believes about what can not function, you don't try many things.
Together with this is sense of humour, it's paradoxical but even when creativity demands hard work, the work is made much more easily when one takes it with certain degree of flippancy. Making jokes results very useful: humour is on itself a creative state.
I'll continue in another entry with more ingredients that can offer you a better inside about creativity, in the meantime please enjoy yourself, I haven't mentioned yet that joyfulness is also part of this. More soon...
