Creativity Overview

I'm told this is a controversial opinion, but it's mine:

I do not believe creativity is anything more special than shoving things together in new ways.

Humans can do it, computers can do it, artists do it, grandmas do it, children do it, monkeys and crows and octopus do it, etc.

And I feel like this idea makes people feel bad because we want to be special. Artists perhaps most-so.

Oh well.

Once you get past that, the nuts and bolts of the implications are pretty great honestly. It implies a certain equality of us all and tries to downplay the (gross) idea that you have to be gifted or otherwise set apart to be "a creative" or use it as a superpower or work in those fields.

Can you combine ideas? Can you make good ones? Can you do it reliably?

And it's a muscle, certainly, I think a lot of people let theirs atrophy over time and it's perhaps why children are the absolute best at it until it's beaten out of them by standardized schooling, but, anyway. The idea is that like physical fitness I do believe anyone can lift the metaphorical 5 pound weights of idea-synthesis until it's a healthy and strong aspect of your life and reflexively just there when you see new things.

So I hope this is encouraging. There's too many friends around me who, as adults, say "oh, I'm not that sort of person" or whatever even while they're doing it.

We can all do it! And we all get better the more we do it! It's just a practice some of us spend more hours doing and so we appear to be 'talented' or 'gifted' or otherwise set apart, and it's not inherent.

The Building Blocks

So if creativity is combining things, what things can you combine?

Steve Jobs has his famous quote about connecting the dots, and I've always liked that straightforward metaphor: every idea, every thought, every thing is a dot and it's all just floating around in your brain.

In hindsight, there's connections because of time: you have a dot for like, a hot stove and touching it connects it to pain and we learn that pathway. And then we can extrapolate the pathway: if there's a hot iron we don't have to touch it to guess that it probably also connects to pain.

This is the fundamental aspect of what makes learning and surviving possible.

Rats in a maze are creative. We judge memory and intelligence in animals by giving them small rewards or punishments associated with things and they can learn those extrapolations too. They have dots and are connecting them and don't even realize it.

We just have a heck of a lot of dots floating around. Decades of them, ethereal and unspoken and often subconsciously unrealized. We get 'gut feelings' when something connects in the back of our brain and we don't fully know why: some situation feels dangerous or a person is just unsettling or whatever.

And we can examine the dots. I can think about my relationship to hot stoves and where it came from and why it exists. They're floating amorphously, but they're also a sort of searchable library. Introspectively, we can examine the obvious ones and perhaps uncover the less obvious ones that lurk just below the waters.

Because of this, I think people tend to see "creatives" as being advanced curators of their dots, like some ancient shopkeeper with shelves and shelves of curios flying around on one of those rail-sliding ladders with the casters. Someone who, when they have a task and go to 'turn on their creativity' can wheel around and select everything they need to assemble in the middle, pulling from the shelves onto a workbench and then starting to weld the pieces together.

This is partially true, but probably in the minority.

The Game As She is Played

Here's the actual truth of creativity:

Each dot is already connected.

When you start with a first item it already has strings to a dozen other things, and if you can select one next thing they too have strings to a fairly limited set of additional things, and so on and so on.

Complexity of a finished product seems opaque and even mystical, but it's often really just a collection, a permutation, of previous dots that basically assemble themselves.

There's two aspects here as a result:

• As a creator, you feel like your creation is obvious and therefore bad or worthless. If you could do it this easily, anyone could, right? This can be called impostor syndrome, which is a silly thing, but people do feel an unease holding their work up to the light because to them the strings were clear.

• As a viewer, you feel like creativity is beyond you because clearly that person is plucking stuff from the aether that you personally would / could never connect yourself, so you shouldn't even try. You're left amazed and dejected by other people's seeming magical "talents" or abilities.

These are, of course, two sides of the same coin.

The obvious fact that we always seem to forget is merely that everyone has different dots in their brains.

We all have different childhoods and teen years and adult lives, we grew up in different places and have seen different things. We have different parents and siblings and friends and teachers. You had a dog, I had a cat, I'm Canadian and you're from Cameroon, the building blocks of our lives are simply and inherently unique.

My dots connect in a different way than yours, or hers, or his, or that computer's.

What is obvious to you as a connection I might never have made. What I connect easily seems opaque.

So creativity isn't special, not really, it's a thing we a) all do anyway and b) all do differently such that it only looks special from the outside because everyone is different enough to come up with interesting permutations and outcomes given similar starting conditions or initial thought seeds.

As such, I don't believe in impostor syndrome and I don't believe in worshiping artists.

How To Level Up

But it is apparent that some people's work is better or cooler or weirder than our mere mortal attempts.

There's a few reasons, and we can emulate them to get similar results:

1. They have more dots

We all have some baseline amount of experiences, whatever the minimum number is to have navigated life up until now, when you're reading this. Everyone here, I have to assume, was 5 years old once. We've all breathed air and had a drink of some type of water. We've felt warm and cold. These are core things.

Our dots are already diverging quickly though, right? Maybe I like water and you don't. Maybe you grew up in a place where water always smelled gross. Maybe you grew up by the ocean and I was born in the prairies. That's already a split in our core life experience in how we might, say, draw water or associate music to water or think about how to redesign water bottles.

So our approaches will be unique already within our interface to shared things - we both have the same dot but different connections - but what about fully new dots, wholly unique dots?

Some people have been to the moon. I have not (yet) been to the moon. They have a fundamental view and experience that I can not emulate or relate to. They can create things that I cannot imagine because they know things I cannot know. Is the moon dust crunchy? Does it inspire poetry in their bones to see the earth so small? These feelings of homesickness and wonder and distance that I can't write or build with.

People who make things we cannot just have dots that we simply don't have.

There's a level of creativity about the different connections, and a higher level of different dots.

2. They have more expression skills

Up until now we've described creativity and art in the abstract sense: dots are all inside your brain.

At some point though, in order to share it, it has to get outside your brain. This is the messy and confusing and frustrating part that sucks and everyone hates it, but that's what the whole practice basically is.

There's the hard skills of being able to manifest ideas into some sort of physical or visual external space.

Everyone can come up with connections and ideas, but the people who have the practice in some medium are the ones who can actually get them out, and clearly when they're out they can be better appreciated.

I cannot sculpt marble, but I can imagine some cool looking sculpture stuck inside the cubic slab. I can 3D model, because I've been doing it for a decade, and surely there's people who can imagine 3D models that I could make for them if only I knew what they were envisioning.

A director cannot (necessarily) act or make special effects, but they can still lead people who can into creating their personal vision. There are many ways of increasing abstraction to externalize thoughts.

All this to say: usually when people shy away and say "I'm not creative" it's usually a phrase to mean "I haven't practiced expressing my ideas like that" and that's totally fine! It's a practice like any other.

3. They develop specific dots

As part of existing inside a specific aesthetic, there's just things you learn and do about that specific genre or medium that makes it juicier.

These things aren't necessarily creative as much as associated. It's deconstructive and contextual. You happen to learn as an artist who makes robots what mechanical parts look cool, or you're a guitarist who does that little strum flourish we might associate with a piece of music such that it feels better, or 'right'.

We feel sometimes like this is copying and the lines are sometimes thin, but ultimately part of what creativity is is that it's always a remix to some extent. These dots are varying degrees of original and we can decide with our taste what is and isn't cool to be pulling and using.

So this is related to 2. where you're becoming better skilled (or at least, stylized) in your medium, but it's also 1. where you're picking up these dots and developing firm strings to bind them. These dots are flavours and tropes that are making the finished work zestier for the viewers. It's just the process of diving deeper into specific fields where you're learning the subtle aspects of what makes something good.

Creativity is inspecting and introspecting components from everything around us.

4. It's a muscle

The more we toy and play with the strings in between things - sometimes even cutting and welding them in intentionally unholy ways - the more we introspect and hold the dots in our hands and then deploy them into the world, the more this process takes shape and the more we trust those strings when they're assembling themselves intuitively.

In the same way that going to the gym helps you move a box in real life, simply giving time and practice to internal creativity is building the pathways and flows to do it faster and easier.

At some point you don't even realize you're doing it, it's just such a reflexive easy obvious momentum: you see something new and your dots are already arranging and combining and strings are being made. Every new experience you have (see 1.) sets you that much further apart and upward, every inspection and dissection (see 3.) helps us evaluate the dot characteristics and every bit of practice you do (see 2.) to share it loops back around into itself.

Practice begets practice.

Creativity begets creativity.