Creativity is a skill

Despite what we convince to ourselves, we can learn to be more creative.

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ART + marketing

25 min readFeb 27, 2018

You’ve probably heard someone say “I’m not really a creative type…”? When people say that, it’s quite rarely a positive thing. Probably never. They might mean that they are not artistic, but usually the message is that this person has given up on being creative in all the ways possible, because that’s just how the world works. Only some selected people get to be creative and they just weren’t part of that special group. He or she didn’t get the possibility to contribute on that domain. What a pity. Then everyone just hopes they are good at something else. Like playing golf or doing dishes. Something where they don’t need to be very creative. And they’ll live not very happily, but moderately satisfied ever after.

I just don’t think that is how the world works. I think we are all creative even if we don’t think we are.

It shouldn’t be like that. I don’t think this approach is going to make this world any better place or any person any happier than a cup of lukewarm instant coffee. I’ve personally had this discussion too many times and I’ve just become too tired to give them an awkward smile and a shrug. I just don’t think that is how the world works. I think we are all creative even if we don’t think we are. And no, we all shouldn’t be artists, but I think everybody can be more creative in their own life and profession to make it more personal, more fun and more meaningful to themselves and everyone else.

What would it need for people to stop saying that they’re not creative at all? What would it take for people to actually challenge themselves and admit that we are all boringly similar people and we are all creative? What would it take for them to say something like “I know I’m not very good at being creative, but I have to work on that” instead of completely denying the whole concept of being creative for themselves?

To me creativity has pretty much always been very concrete and real thing, but when I started to talk about this with my friends, it was surprisingly hard to define even though I kind of knew what I was talking about. So I had to come up with an extremely simple way to explain this common-sense approach to creativity. It took me several years at the back of my mind to build this seemingly simple package that takes help from neuroscience, practical creativity learnings and good ideas around the domain of creativity. In the end I’ve come to conclusion that the common-sense approach to creativity is simply something like this: creativity is a skill that anybody can be good at it if they want to. Of course there are some differences in what kind of physiological and cognitive resources people have, but everybody has a possibility to learn to be creative, whether or not their tendencies make some aspect of it easier and some harder.

So I’d like to share with you some insights and what we can all do about it. I’ll explain briefly how I see the current situation and why it feels like we need this common-sense approach to creativity. I’ll also go through basics of what it means to learn a skill, explain a scientific version how creativity could be seen and what we can do to be better at it.

Demystifying creativity

“People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don’t have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it’s divine. And so it is with everything in the universe” — Hippocrates

Almost every time I read or hear something about creativity, there’s some kind of mystified atmosphere around it. Some call it vaguely just talent, some higher power and some even called it a god. Most of us probably haven’t even thought about where creativity comes from. In a way the version about god is on a right path, but not the way they think they are. This phenomenon is called ‘God of the gaps’: There’s a gap in understanding of some aspect of the natural world, therefore the cause must be supernatural. It used to be a lightning storm, stars in the sky and even breathing at some point in history. For some reason creativity is still in that weird “I don’t know what it is so it must be mystic power” -placeholder category. Even orgasms, dreams and rain aren’t in that category anymore. I understand that it’s seen as complicated issue, but making creativity divine does nothing but harm to further understanding of it. Why wouldn’t creativity be from this world like everything else in this world?

If we put on our reality glasses and see creativity as a skill, we can learn what it is, how to control it and maybe even be better at it.

This mystification makes creativity sound like something only a few extraordinary people have and they are chosen to do something amazing in this world. Us mere mortals just have to watch and clap. We know that’s not the case, but it does sound way more epic to talk about godly force than a simple, everyday skill. If we put on our reality glasses and see creativity as a skill, we can learn what it is, how to control it and maybe even be better at it. Godly force is a bit difficult to control. At least if you’re not a god. When people considered diseases to be an external, divine force, the medication was just a hope that they don’t die, but once they got some sense in it, acknowledged that it is in fact a real world thing, they learned what the diseases actually are and understood what to do with them. Now we know where diseases came from, how to treat them and how to avoid them. Today it would feel pretty stupid to say diseases are caused by some divine force. (I know, some people are still that stupid).

We need to change how we view creativity, imagination and other things that are used to describe forces beyond our own, but now are part of our everyday life and affects how we behave.

How do we cultivate creativity at the moment?

“Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.” — Sir Ken Robinson

We, as a society, are desperately looking for creativity and creative people. We know we have them somewhere. We just really don’t know where to look for them. We don’t even really know what we are looking for because general public apparently hasn’t even really decided what creativity is. But sometimes we do find them. Or rather, more often than not, they find themselves as entrepreneurs or artists and they pop out of the crowd. When they succeed, we can say they actually are creative people, but before they succeed, it’s really hard to say what and where those creative people are.

Currently we can only give some attributes which a person has to have in order to grow up as creative human being. We can say some things about their environment, we can say something about the upbringing and a little bit about the education. But that’s it. As a society, we are basically just hoping to get some creative people here. We don’t really do anything special about it except trust that it will happen again, because it has happened before.

So in the end, some people learn something about creativity and some don’t. Some people see themselves as creative and some don’t unfortunately. That’s pretty much the highly refined system of making more creative people what we have now in our society.

Educating people to be more creative could be more sophisticated. Every aspect of our society could encourage people to take more creative steps and almost every company in this world would need some more creative ways of working at the moment. They say that there’s two different ways to do things: ‘strike’ and ‘hit’. A strike is something that is deliberate and it’s the successful end result of a conscious process. A hit is kind of a fluke that just happens to be successful because the setting makes it possible by accident, but the end results in both ways are kind of similar when everything goes well.

There’s a difference between just ending up being creative or doing that deliberately.

Here’s a third way of doing things: not doing them.

We are riding the ‘hit’ wave quite happily in how we are dealing with creativity in general. Some stuff seems to happen from time to time and society benefits from it. We should be able to see where we are and develop our education system to help people find their creativity more like the ‘strike’. We should be able to decide what creativity actually is, teach it to everyone and then we can see where it takes us. There’s a difference between just ending up being creative or doing that deliberately.

What is creativity?

You don’t have to be a genius to be creative. You just have to be human. Being creative is something that everybody does naturally. Every day. Several times. Some people end up being better at it than others of course, but creativity isn’t just a spark of genius some people get out of the blue. Well, some people get those, but they don’t actually come out of the blue. There’s a process, but we’ll get to that a bit later.

Wikipedia defines creativity as a “phenomenon whereby something new and somehow valuable is formed. The created item may be intangible (such as an idea, a scientific theory, a musical composition, or a joke) or a physical object (such as an invention, a literary work, or a painting).” That’s a very broad explanation but it’s not an easy task to define what creativity actually is. Because this is an article about creating something unique and novel, we probably shouldn’t borrow ideas from someone else. However, overly qualified neuroscientist and neuropsychiatrist Nancy C. Andreasen has a great book called “the creative brain” and in that book we can find a pretty good definition of creativity she’s used since the 70’s. According to Andreasen in order to classify some activity as creative it has to include all of these three main components: First, it has to be something original. Second, it has to have some value and finally, it must lead to some kind of creative product.

First component definitely makes sense. I agree that in order to be considered as creative action, it has be original i.e. something that has never been before. It sounds amazing and wonderful, even a bit off-putting. But when you think about it, there’s loads of things that has never been done before. Like some of these sentences right here. It might not be amazing, but if it has never happened before, it is by definition, original. Nothing earth-shattering, just original in that particular context where that creative work happens. Original to its creator.

It’s a characteristic that is not to be compared to others. You are the only one who can measure that.

What comes to the second component, I must disagree a little bit with Andreasen, even though I’m probably not really qualified to do that. It’s just that the matter of value is so subjective I wouldn’t include that in my definition of creativity. Andreasen uses “a car without wheels” as an example that has no creative value at all. If that car without wheels was a product of someone’s creative process, it is definitely a creative product. It might feel like worthless to some people. Most definitely to people who would see car with only the function it already has and need to ride it. It might even be worthless for hundreds of years, but if at some point someone gets some creative value out of it, will it then become a creative product? I think that sounds too glorifying and dependent on someone else’s opinion. Why would we let other people define what is valuable? Creativity isn’t like appearance or success that other people get to rate. It’s more like happiness or curiosity. You can be happy and creative even if everybody else says you’re not. It’s a characteristic that is not to be compared to others. You are the only one who can validate your own creativity. It only has to have value to the creator but it might have some value to others also. This is one of the major problems with current mainstream view on creativity. It crops people out with some artificial measurements that expresses some weird need to categorise people into creative and non-creative groups. Creativity is a skill that you use to create stuff, not a throne room that only fits certain amount of people inside it.

The third component however is again something I would totally agree with Andreasen. From creativity must come something creative. A creative product as Andreasen describes it. If I don’t create something, it can’t really be considered as creative action. Copying exactly what others have done or repeating clichés couldn’t generally be considered as creative action. The word ‘product’ should be defined extremely broadly. A product doesn’t have to be anything tangible. I could have loads of ideas, plans and solutions to many different issues and I could consider them to be creative products of my creative process. They might not have a physical presence in this world, but nonetheless, it is definitely a product of creativity what we are talking about.

So, let’s agree that there has to be two main components for an action to be considered as creative. It has be original and it has to lead to some kind of product. Intangible or tangible.

What is a skill?

When I talk about creativity as a skill, I don’t mean to put it on a same level with swimming, driving a car or boiling an egg. I can’t just DO creativity. It’s not that kind of skill. It’s a skill of a higher level. Creativity is more in line to be compared to being emphatic or having a sense of humour. These mentioned skills can be learned like any other skill — granted that boiling an egg is probably the most trickiest one — but some of them might seem so unconfined and shapeless that it’s hard to know where to start.

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary a skill is “the ability to use one’s knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance”.

Good news here is that we learn new skills all the time. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary a skill is “the ability to use one’s knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance”. So basically almost everything I do needs a skill I have learned at some point. From making a breakfast to understanding my friend’s problems. (Bad examples. I suck at both.)

Skills aren’t usually just one particular skill but rather they are a bundle of sub-skills. At some point in my life I learned to boil an egg. Let’s take that as an example. Here’s a rough list of sub-skills that I have to learn if I want to boil an egg:

Learn to put the right amount of water into the pan (also how to get the water into the pan and what is a pan).
Learn to put the eggs into the water without breaking them (also how to get the eggs and how to handle them)
Learn how to put the stove on (also what the stove is and where it is).
Learn how long they have to boil in order to achieve the wanted hardness (also how to use the timer).
Learn to put them into cold water so that the shell is easier to take of (also how to get the water to be cold enough).

Easy to learn and hard to master, isn’t it? Even if I kind of know how to do it, I can always learn more about it. This is probably one of the most obvious skills a modern human can have, but even as simple skill as boiling an egg has several sub-skills that I should start learning if I want to have a perfect self boiled egg on my plate.

Well, how do I learn to boil an egg or to be creative? By doing and reflecting what I’ve done. That’s pretty much the only way to learn it. Sorry to say. That’s how babies learn everything that grown up humans will later do in this world. By just doing a lot of things. Lots of mistakes, some successes and then some more mistakes. In order to use a skill, it must be well planted into our brains so that we don’t have to think about it while we’re doing it. Just like when I’m learning a new language, I have several steps where I first have to try to remember the words, then at some point I try to communicate more complex issues with longer sentences and on later stage I can even play with the new language and communicate with different tones. Maybe even try to have some comedic effects with it (on purpose). All it needs is my will to be better at it and some practice with the new skill in many different situations.

About learning a skill, Eduardo Briceño has a great insight between the learning zone and the performance zone. When we are using our skills in the performance zone, we usually have higher stakes and it’s usually important to be good at it as we perform. Like a surgeon during a knee surgery. We don’t learn a lot when we are in the performance zone, because we can’t really reflect while we are performing. That why it’s important to spend some time also in the learning zone and not just do things seriously all the time. There we observe, reflect and adjust what we have done and how we could be better at it. In the learning zone we should have an environment where the stakes are low and we can concentrate on the deliberate practice.

“like natural resources, human resources are buried deep and you need to dig to get them out”

Learning new things is never easy. But if I can see the benefits and maybe even have fun while doing it, it’s going to be worth it. It will take some time, as learning is always slow, but then again I’m not in a hurry anyway. I’m doing quite well right now, so learning to be more creative is just a bonus I’m going to get. Everyone will be good at different things at different stages. As Creativity guru and the main character in few of the most popular TED talk videos Sir Ken Robinson says “like natural resources, human resources are buried deep and you need to dig to get them out”. So don’t just kick around. Keep searching and you’ll find amazing things.

Creative process

“There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.”
–Vincent Van Gogh

The basic principle of creative process is pretty simple even tough there’s a great mystery surrounding it. In reality there’s no supernatural powers involved, just our very own versatile, wonderfully complicated brains with some help of other organs. Those processes are something one couldn’t study enough. However in this case I’ll simplify the process to make it little bit easier to explain. We will lose some details in translation, but the basic principles stays the same.

From the neurological point of view we are being creative all the time. You’ve probably been creative in some small ways already today. Even without thinking about it. For the simplest example, we are creating something new every time we produce a sentence that we’ve never produced before. The process is very roughly same with every creative action and decision we make. There’s three main parts in the process and we’re going to call them Impulse, Unconscious mind and Creative decisions.

1. Impulse

This is my senses working to get the information from my surrounding world into my head. In this case we will also include everything I “hear” and “see” in my head. Even though it’s not the eyes or ears that see it, it’s an image or a sound that sends the impulse. Almost all the regions of the brain deal with sensory impulses in cooperation like a proper team. They all do their part with different aspects of my inputs and then sends them onward in my brain. Calling this part of the creative process an Impulse is an effort to put that extremely complicated process of gathering relevant info into a one word. We could also call it ‘perception’ or ‘spark’ but I think the word ‘impulse’ is quite good since it refers to something that gives a motive to do something. Nerve cells communicate with something called nerve impulses so it also fits. This is the starting point of my creative process.

2. Unconscious mind

Because you have spent a lot of time on this earth (I assume), you have done a lot of different things (again, I assume) and you’re a unique human being because of that (I know you are). Those experiences that you’ve been through have sculpted you to become the person you now are. No one in this world has ever lived exactly the same life as you have. But we don’t have all of the memories archived neatly somewhere in folders and boxes. Even though I have loads of memories, I might not be able to remember all of them on demand because the system how my memories form is extremely complicated. I have memories that involves all of my senses and there’s more coming every second. First they become my short-term memories and in the end some of them will be archived into my long-term memory. Information that goes into my long-term memory can become part of my mind called ‘unconscious mind’ that “consists of the processes in the mind which occur automatically and are not available to introspection, and include thought processes, memories, interests, and motivations”. When someone says “I don’t know where that idea came from”, this is the place where it came from. There’s a lot of material in our unconscious minds and that is the stuff that the impulse goes through when we’re in the process of being creative. Regions in our brains that deal with memory and experiences are called Temporal Lobe and Hippocampus. Other regions are participating out of courtesy (like the smart and casual Frontal Lobe), but those two are mainly considered to be the ones who takes care of memory of our experiences. We could also call this part of creative process something like ‘imagination’ or ‘learning’ but ‘unconscious mind’ conveys the idea of vast memory storage pretty well. If impulse would be the spark, this would be the log that is needed to make the fire. You have to have some material to use.

3. Creative decisions

Here we are approaching the more conscious part of the process. This area is more commonly understood as creativity. My example impulse started it’s journey and went through my unconscious mind, it eventually reaches my Frontal Lobe where I process my problem solving, judgement and social behaviour. Now I can do something with it. How the impulse probably appears to me is some sort of fast but faint whisper or blurry image that I try to interpret. It’s basically just a seed of an idea that I have to water to make it grow. I try to pull stuff from my unconscious mind to my conscious mind like I would grab stuff from dark closet and put it on the table in front of myself. I might not see or hear the impulse before I actually do something with it. Our brains compute faster than we can understand and in some moments of spontaneity we might do something that we can’t even understand ourself. Even though it might not seem like it, even then we are making creative decisions. We make those creative decisions with the material we’re getting from the deep, unconscious parts of our brains. If impulse would be spark and unconscious mind would be a log, this part of the creative process would be the fire. The thing that is considered to be the usefull part.

Congratulations, you just produced a sentence.
You created something new.

Here’s an example how the creative process works in very broad stokes. You’re speaking with another human being and you hear him saying something that evokes your need to answer. It might be more than just the sound. It’s probably all the senses that take a note of the situation and kick that impulse moving. That impulse goes to your unconscious mind where it filters through all the stuff that you’ve experienced during your life and that is relevant to that moment. You might have some history with that person or someone that reminds about him. Then it continues its extremely quick journey to your Frontal lobe. At this point you’re more aware what is happening. You can do your creative decisions and form the sentence you need to based on the stuff your brain has just served to you. You open your mouth and answer to that person with the accuracy only your brains can achieve. Congratulations, you just produced a sentence. You created something new.

We might have never even noticed anything like this happening in our heads even tough it happens all the time. That’s probably because those signals, impulses travels rather fast in our brain. About 430 km per hour (That’s over 268 miles per hour for the people in United States, Liberia and Myanmar) and it’s not that long distance they have to travel. You could argue that some people have slower signal than others, but that’s a different discussion. Anyway, it’s very unnoticeable process to have an idea until it becomes something else than just an idea.

This process happens in our brains in almost every possible scenario. If I drop something and end up catching it, I’ve done the same thing. I did a spontaneous thing and the same process went through my brains. Impulse: I see something is dropping. Unconscious mind: Should I catch this? What kind of experiences I have catching this kind of object? Creative decision: I’ll kick it back up and catch it with my hand on it’s way up. In a fractional part of a second I end up catching the thing and I never even thought about it. Same process with pretty much every moment in our lives.

That’s the extremely simplified process in few simple scenarios. It’s the same process with more complicated things, but of course it needs more impulses, more listening to yourself in every phase and a lot more time. So it needs skill to be creative but it’s definitely not divine or even impossible to learn.

Can you learn to be more creative?

“Madness is never that far away. It’s as close as saying yes to the wrong impulse. The people who stay sane are the people who can make those quick decisions: “Should I stick my fingers into the fan, or leave the room right now?” — Jim Carrey

It’s not like we can go to the creativity gym and put our brains on the treadmill.

Now we understand that creativity is a skill, a skill is something we can learn and we also know basics how creative process works. Next we would need to get more creative. What should we do? It’s not like we can go to the creativity gym and put our brains on the treadmill. What we can do tho, is start to learn it like any other skill. Break it into those smaller pieces and try to find out how we could train ourselves to be better at all of them. Just like boiling an egg, creativity has its sub-skills also. We don’t have to be better at everything immediately.

Impulse

We know how to use our senses, right? You do if you are reading this. Or even if somebody is reading it to you. Normally when people say they go look for inspiration, what they actually do is look for spark to get the fire started. However, we can’t go straight to making the fire. We must get better at finding the sparks first. That spark, that impulse comes from outside world into our brains. We must train to keep those senses, our inputs open. We have at least six senses (the sixth isn’t the ability to see dead people but the sense of balance also knows as Proprioception), so there’s several different things we have to do to wake them up.

Good place to start listening to our senses is just to sit in silence and just be. Minimise our experiences. Our senses are working almost all the time, but they are usually tuned to bypass most of the small things. We just have to sit down and mark down mentally what we hear, feel, see, smell, taste and how many dead people there are in the same room with us (or optionally how balanced do we feel). If we don’t get anything from that, we just haven’t tuned into those low frequency senses yet. Other extreme is to maximise our experiences. It’s probably more fun but also a lot more complicated. We have to listen to sounds we’ve never listened before, go see visually most epic stuff possible, taste thing that we wouldn’t want to put in our mouths, smell stuff that we wouldn’t normally smell, touch all surfaces we can reach and challenge our balance (or optionally try to find out if Bruce Willis is actually dead). The point of all of this is to wake ourselves up from the routines our senses have gotten used to. So let’s jump into the water and get wet.

This is the part where the old saying “smooth seas never made a skilled sailor” really makes sense.

Unconscious mind

If training our impulses is about finding our senses with new experiences, training our unconscious mind will demand even more. To get more logs into our fires, we really must go and gather those logs. In his book “The Medici Effect” Frans Johansson explains how creativity comes from diverse cultures and disciplines when they intersect. Bringing ideas from one domain into another. So we must steer away from our predefined comfort zones and our nice routines. This step in creative process needs experiences that makes big difference in our lives. This is the part where the old saying “smooth seas never made a skilled sailor” really makes sense. We have go to the deep end and fall in love, lose a friend, travel, change profession, read great books and go broke. Anything that will shake our foundations. That’s the material for the long-term memory and for the unconscious mind. There’s no really right way or even easy way to do this. Important thing would be to do something. Anything. We have to take risks and live. We have to gather material for our creativity and really cultivate our life experiences like this would be the only life we have (because it is).

Creative decisions

Usually when we hear about creativity training or read an article how to boost our creativity, it has to do with this part. There’s plenty of help. Sir Ken Robinson uses the term ‘imagination’ from those two previous steps and this step he calls “Applied imagination” because this is when we start doing something with the resources we have. Training our creativity is like training to be more curious or happier. We have to challenge ourselves and change the way we operate. We have to challenge the status quo that we’ve spent so much energy to build. You don’t have to burn and pillage everything, just shake things up.

When we have even the faintest impulse to say or do something, we should at least acknowledge it silently in our heads even if we wouldn’t act on it.

The biggest challenge in this phase is to recognise those new, weak seeds of ideas we are almost having. They just want to bring us messages from our unconscious mind. We shouldn’t be too judgemental so that they don’t go away. We want to hear and see what they are and what they will be. We should feed them but with what? Improvisational theatre has this extremely good rule where you say YES to everything our brains, our impulses offer us. Of course we shouldn’t run around like Jim Carrey in the movie “Yes Man” but the basic idea is the same. When we have even the faintest impulse to say or do something, we should at least acknowledge it silently in our heads even if we wouldn’t act on it. If you actually act on it (which I strongly recommend), it will spark loads of new impulses and the snowball will start rolling pretty easily. That way we can learn to know our impulses better and start finding what kind of creative person we are and want to be. Of course we have to be able to control those impulses in order to be part of this vaguely civilised world, but not too much. We have to be prepared to be wrong and look stupid. We must challenge those rules of society to the point where we actually reach the limits. That’s where the creative treasures are buried.

Those impulses are also a great way to understand ourselves. By acknowledging them, we start to see that we actually have a lot of personality and there’s a whole world of creativity in us. It’s not some divine power that gives us ideas. It’s us. It’s you. Your own brains and experiences. You just have to start using them.

So what now?

I don’t assume that everyone would immediately rip off their clothes and run into the forest feeling free and reborn. But I do hope we could all stop for a while and challenge ourselves just a little bit and maybe a little bit more tomorrow. This is a process that might take a lifetime. Everybody starts when they are kids, but not everybody gets to continue it for long. However, life is a very long time. We can relearn stuff we have forgotten and unlearn stuff we don’t need to know anymore. We could approach creativity step by step. Let’s be merciful for ourselves because we are only people after all.

People have been creative since their beginning. Back then they probably just started doing things because they really needed to achieve something useful. People have just tried to fix flaws or tried to survive and while doing that, they accidentally created a lot of important things. At some point we ended up having alphabets, education and democracy. Nobody really had to stop and think about why they are creative and how they could be better at it. It was enough that they were creative. One could argue that it was some mystical force that was leading people into creating all of that stuff. However, all the evidence points out that it was actually those people themselves who created it. You know, actual people. Creative people. Just like you.

Now do something creative. Anything. I know you can. And if you feel like you can’t, you know you can learn it. (If you haven’t figured that out by now, I’m afraid you have just lost about 25 minutes of your life)

Overwhelmed? Don’t worry, there’s no rush. You have rest of your life to learn about this stuff.

This is not a scientific document and I’m not a real scientist, unfortunately. I’d love to hear all of your opinions about these ideas and I’m willing to do a lot of things in order to research this approach even more. I’m really just a guy, standing in front of a interesting scientific phenomenon, asking it to be more understandable.