Creativity Is Easy and Not Easy To Find
Creativity is often one of those words meaning everything and nothing at the same time depending on your relationship to it the moment it pops into your head or you see it staring at you from a webpage. If you’re moving forward on a project it might mean you are in a creative flow, on the other hand if you find yourself stuck and have no idea on how to proceed creativity may feel like a noose around your mind, becoming tighter and tighter.
Creativity of course means whatever we want it to mean, it’s personal for each of us, we decide how we understand it and how we either embrace or discard what others offer us as a definition. We also decide as we read or listen about how to tease out more creativity in our work whether there is anything worthwhile being shared. And it’s this very meaning-meaninglessness that makes creativity so powerful. Creativity is what we make or don’t make of it.
In a flash creativity is conceived with intention and birthed with attention. And once formed it can just as quickly disperse in a gray cloud of despair and disbelief. The only thing creativity demands of us is openness to the moment, give it that and you may catch it as the next moment rolls around
Open yourself to the moment and #Creativity will show itself Click To Tweet
I came across the this brickwork of an article a couple of days ago, it’s made up of paragraphs each from a different article. That’s right, each excerpt below was taken from an original source to create something different yet not different. I applaud Tanner Christensen for the work and invite you to read the short excerpt I’ve pasted below and maybe view it in its entirety.
- Creativity is not the lone genius myth, it is actually the result of connectedness. 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.
- It is about knowing what and how to observe and directing your attention accordingly: what details do you focus on? What details do you omit? And how do you take in and capture those details that you do choose to zoom in on? In other words, how do you maximize your brain attic’s potential? …Everything we choose to notice has the potential to become a future furnishing of our attics.
- Catch the drifting as it happens, refocus, then repeat as necessary. That’s it.
- “Your ability to recognize what your mind is engaging with, and control that, is really a core strength,” said Peter Malinowski, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Liverpool John Moores University in England.
- Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.
- And once we have all of this in its right place… we can start to know what Picasso meant when he said, “If they took away my paints I’d use pastels. If they took away my pastels I’d use crayons. If they took away my crayons I’d use pencils. If they stripped me naked and threw me in prison I’d spit on my finger and paint on the walls.” Or what Michelangelo meant when he said that the sculpture was in the stone; it was his job to release it.
- Creative people combine playfulness and discipline.
This article is a mishmash of excerpts from other sources, none of the writing here is original. Each paragraph was taken from somewhere else and put into the article as an experiment in creative play to see what would happen if multiple ideas around creativity were put into one format.
Most everything you need to know about creativity.
