(39) What I learned about Creativity

This may not be what you’re expecting.

Anyone who knows me personally might assume I am going to write about artistic endeavours. Perhaps waxing lyrical about architectural design, jewellery design, graphics, illustration, fine art or any one of the many art / design / craft disciplines I’ve been into over the years. Yes I love all that stuff and could easily bang on about it as I have before, but it’s not that type of specific creativity I’m exploring today.

I find most people tend to categorise themselves as either creative or not creative. They might think back to the last time they did anything ‘artistic’ which might have been as far back as secondary school (and you know what I think about our paltry education system). But I am on about the wider sense of the meaning of creativity, which I believe we all have.

Something I have discovered is the many ways that we can express creativity, in fact, practically everything we do can be described as ‘creative’. One of the most fun applications of creativity I have come across is the act of doing business itself. Finding a niche product or service, exploring its potential, carving out markets and generating sales. Building on sales, devising additional routes to market through expansion, spotting the growth part of your product cycle and timing your next product or service to maximum effect. Experimenting with different marketing messages and mediums, communication with customers in new ways and seeing the possibilities in the increasingly sophisticated technology available to us all. Just fab. 

Other people get immense pleasure from the creativity of numbers and systems using their passions for diverse rewards as building investment portfolios, programming state of the art software or ensuring their resources are used to their full potential. Luckily for us many others find creativity helping others achieve things, either through formal teaching routes, producing the billions of pieces of free information available to access online networks and blogs or via the thousands of forums and informal discussion boards packed with useful information any one of us can freely access and benefit from.

And, as many people have discovered, there is massive creativity in times of need – when your back’s against the wall and you have to do something amazing to get yourself through a situation. Again – the creativity rises up inside and you find a flow of ideas, solutions and tactics to apply to your problem. And that is when I find creativity at its most fantastic. The human capacity to problem solve is a wonderful, wonderful thing!