First of all, I apologize for the weird content that I am uploading lately. I have been thinking about many things over the past weeks. Maybe is a consequence of melancholic behavior. Who knows.
Anyways, the topic of today is about our creative processes as humans. I consider myself to be a very creative person - others consider that of myself too. However, I haven't been really creative since couple of months ago. You know, you just can't sit and be creative. It has to come to you. It has to go out from you.
I just recently graduated from LSE on a course of Negotiation and Leadership, I think I mentioned that I was studying this before in another post. One of the modules that made me think the most was the one related to Creativity and emotions in negotiation, especially from the creativity side of things.
Let's just all get into the same page first. According to previous research, creativity can be defined by two factors: novelty - an idea being new and different - and usefulness - and idea that is able to make a contribution towards solving a problem. This is the first thing I learned from the course. So far, I agree with everything said.
Now, something that really struke me was that in this course they mention that we can learn how to be creative. Wait what? Can we? Really? At least, I am not really sure about that... However, something that I do believe is that creativity can be something you lose over time depending on the enviromental factors that surround someone or different cirumstances and that over time, as the circumstances change, you can slowly recover your creativity. But I think that is not exactly learning to be creative. I will explain a bit better why I disagree with the fact that we can practise creativity - and I have to say this is purely my own opinion and it is not backed-up by research. Most likely research will be able to put arguments to why what I am saying might not make sense. I just had experiences with different people and eexperience with creative processes for almost all my life, so I just made up my own opinion on this topic.
Basically according to the research of what creativity is, there are three components that make an individual creative.
- To have domain-relevant skills, whicih basically means to have knowledge about a domain.
- To have creativity-relevant skills, more related to knowledge of heuristics.
- To have task motivation, basically the attitude towards a task.
I am not sure how you see it, but for me those three components can't be learned. From the domain perspective, I thoroughly believe that you first develop an interest when you are young towards a domain and become very good or are very talented about it. Th creative aspects come just after that, and is highly influenced by your personality and cognitive style. The task motivation also aligns with this, if you are passionate about someting, you will naturally be having a positive outlook towards the task itself.
Everything seems reasonable until now. I have a couple of things to keep covering. First and foremost, I really don't believe you can learn this. Imagine, some people never find what they are trully passionate about in life. So following these patterns, how can they learn to be creative in any field if they don't care about the field in the first place? On the other hand, people that are naturally creative and fit in these boxes, how can they mantain the level of creativity and own the processes in environments such as the regular working environment - when you work towards something that it is not of your own (just an example).
These type of things make me think and believe that you can't really just wake up one day, do some exercises and become creative. However, if you are creative you can definitely lose your skills and recover them with time and change of environment.
What are your thougths on this topic?
