Why do you call yourself creative?
If a dog could tell us, would it let us know that it’s having a headache? Or a bad day? In case of a leg injury, it can at least keep licking the wound until it heals. When it has an upset stomach, it can tug at the grass to puke later. It knows when to wag its tail and when to hide it between its legs. So, a dog, for all its stupid beliefs in human goodness, is a problem-solver.
And that brings us to the crux of today’s blog post: do you have to always solve a problem to call yourself creative?
In other words, is Ranga creative?
On the surface, everybody is dealing with their own sets of problems but not everybody is able to solve them effectively. Some guy is toiling from point A to point C while somebody else has figured a way out on how to reach point F within the same period of time.
Different situations, different solutions, different results.
Yet, the word ‘creative’ is bound to be associated with those who breathe loudly and leave behind a scent of art wherever they go. A coder, on the other hand, with her head buried in her laptop, won’t bother to ink herself with being creative. She codes — nothing more, nothing else. Whereas a graphic designer would spend a major part of the day surmising on what makes him more creative than his peers. His entire identity rests on the column of small c. [Remember, Big C is cancer?]
It’s worth wondering whether creativity is really a patented property of the few while it’s a marked feature of the nameless majority. One can be creative in a lot of ways but one can always be more idiotic in a lot many more ways. The only difference being the so-called creative person’s idiocy is considered creative too. Just a dent needed to push forth the art of thinking differently.
Personally, I genuinely believe that creativity reeks of arrogance as it shortens the distance between self-aware and self-center. During my years as a journalist, I interviewed a lot of creative folks and the characteristic common to all of them was they felt they weren’t alike. Maybe in the field of cinema, with a lot of exposure to camera, you end up disguising as an outlier even though your onscreen traits are quite ubiquitous.
It was only after moving to the field of communications with an emphasis on marrying words with visuals that I understood why creative folks like to think in binary. Either this poster will click with the audience or it won’t. Either this slogan will hit the target or it won’t. There is no middle ground. In all fairness, this cut-throat assessment comes from a place of insecurity as well as brilliance. A rather strange bedfellows to have things going.
But then, the square root of intelligence is idea. Everything else in the equation is an allure, a promise to fascinate others.
As a case study, let’s say, you write an ad script and read it out to the five people in the room. Two of them like it while two don’t and one is unsure. Sensibilities (collective), mood (momentary), personality (individual) – these factors determine whether your idea is going to be accepted or not. Of course, we are excusing that ugly wart called prejudice. So, at the end of the reading, you are waiting for the fifth person to tilt in your favour. As if the six of you wholly understand the heartbeat of the larger populace that you are targeting with your ad?
Creativity, in a nutshell, is a cry for attention because art, in its purest form, accepts the truth that only time is precious and attention is its only currency. And this could be the reason why a majority of us don’t have the means to deal in such a shrewd market.
