Discovery v’s Creativity

I’ve stopped calling myself a ‘Creative’ and call myself a ‘Venturer’ instead.

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

- Michelangelo

There has been a lot of discussion about the word creativity over recent years, and I mean a lot. Google “Creativity” and you get 46 million results, most of which will tell you that you need to be more creative than you were yesterday and that they have discovered the secret to amazing creativity.

But Michelangelo had a different idea: he didn’t create things — he discovered things. Creation is doing what God did at the dawn of time: taking nothing and making something. Discovery assumes that something is already there, it has already been created — we just have to find it.

It might be semantics, but there is a difference between the two ideas, and I think Discovery carries a lot less expectation than Creativity. And Venturing is all about Discovery.

The funny thing is, the more I focus on discovery, the more ‘creative’ I end up being. The things I discover can be looked at from different angles. They can be poked, they can be tested and tinkered with. Discovered things have substance, something to play with.

Or, as Michelangelo found out, perhaps you just need to take a few things away to reveal the masterpiece.