Is our creativity dead?
Rethinking Creativity: Enhancing Our Ability to Create by Practising Divergent Thinking.
I’ve just finished the course Becoming Creative / An Artistic Guide to Creativity from Brent Eviston on SkillShare, and it really does make me rethink about creativity.
Is it that people are born creative, or that creativity is a skill that can be learnt? And if it’s learnable, how can we enhance our creativity?
But first, let me ask you a question, what’s creativity for you?
Here’s how the dictionary answer it:
Reading this definition leads me to another thought: What is considered original? Must it be something that has never been thought of by anybody? Does it need to be separated completely from other things to be deemed original?
No, again, at least for me, as an artist.
What is orginality? Undetected plagiarism.
— William Ralph Inge
In fact, I believe human beings cannot create truly new things.
We learn from each other, we combine different ideas, make connections, and develop our own ideas, ideas that are not expected (or common). And they are called orignal ideas.
If you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original
-Gary Panter
So, back to the definition of creativity, for me:
Creativity is the ability to create a combination from existing things in an unexpected way.
Divergent and Convergent thinking
They are the two spectrums of problem-solving and creativity.
Divergent thinking involves generating multiple ideas and possibilities without a filter, meaning that there is no right or wrong ideas. This thinking allows you to come up with new and innovative solutions, ones that nobody has ever thought of before.
Convergent thinking is the complete opposite of divergent thinking: There are only right or wrong ideas. And convergent thinker tries to narrow down to few possibilities through analysing and logical reasoning.
Most of us are used to be creative when we were young, I mean, super duper creative, according NASA’s famous study.
Among 5-year-old children, 98% were classified as possessing exceptional imaginative abilities. However, this figure decreased to 12% for 15-year-olds and further plummeted to 2% for adults.
For kids, In a play yard, a corner with a castle on it can be a underwater palace, we dived into an adventure with our toys, imagining a pillow is a spaceship, creating a whole battleship fight with our fingers…
Where is our curiosity, why aren’t we creative any more?
What’s the time when you were most creative? What did you do?
It was until we went to school, and there, our education system taught us what is right and wrong, and there’s only one way to come up to a right solution.
And it kills creativity.
I don’t say that convergent thinking is bad. In fact, it’s important some time to have an exact right solution, especially calculation. But in some times, if convergent thinking is overused, it destroys our creativity. Creativity is all about exploring new ideas, combining things unexpectedly, and coming up with ideas that nobody has ever thought of. However, with convergent thinking, We think that there’s only one possible solution, and we reject any uncommon ideas right at the beginning, saying that ‘nah, that can’t be right’.
How to be more creative?
So now we know about two ways of thinking: Divergent and Convergent thinking. And in order to be creative, we should shift our thinking into divergent thinking, which means we welcome every new ideas without any right or wrong judgement. Now let’s think about how we can practice being more of a ‘divergent thinker’.
There’s an exercise that I like a lot, coming from a SkillShare class Going Viral: Write, Film & Make Content People Share. This exercise can help you boost your creativity to the fullest within only around 20 minutes a day.
Here’s how it goes:
Pick you 20-minute free time: It can be in the morning, it can be in the evening before you go to bed. Choose a time when you feel most comfortable with less stress.
Pick out an object you like: It can be a phone, a bottle, a bar of chocolate, a chewing gum… Whatever that you find interesting.
Now the fun begins…
Set the timer for 5 minutes. Now in this 5 minutes, jot down 20 ideas that come up to your mind of how you can use this object.
The most important thing here is you must write down every idea that pops up with zero judgement. There’s no time to say ‘nah, that can’t be right’, just write it.
After 5 minutes, rest for 1 minute.
And then a new interval begins, 20 new ideas for the next 5 minutes, and rest for minute.
Note: what I mean new is that you cannot recycle the previous 20 ideas, you have to create new ones! If you find yourself stuck, try combine it with other things around and see what you can do with them together. For example: I think of what if I put engine inside the handset of a phone, and… Tada! A flying handset lol.
Repeat it for 3 times
After 3 times, you will have 60 ideas on the paper, pick out 20 ideas that you feel like the best ideas for you.
What is the point of this exercise?
Boost your creativity to the fullest. You will notice this pattern: Those first ideas on the paper are general and common. But the more you generate ideas, the more specific it gets, and the more unexpected they are. This exercise is also called Brainstorming. It’s not simply an exercise, but you can apply this to every field in your work: Next time when you need new ideas for work you’re doing, try apply this exercise and you will be surprised with how many good ideas you get. Now imagine a whole team doing this together!
At first, it’s so damn hard to even think of a new idea. But you don’t have to reach 60 ideas in just 3 intervals. Take your time, may it be 4, 5 or 6 intervals. You have to push out of your comfort zone, and train your brain to be creative and look at things in different perspectives. Our creativity isn’t dead, it’s just not been trained for a long time, and now it’s time we sharpened it!