109. Creativity Is for Everyone!

What in life deserves our time and attention, and what things don't? I hope that as we consider that question, along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “Creativity Is for Everyone!”

You are a creative genius. The one thing you need to do to unlock your creative superpower is to subscribe to my paid creativity seminar. Kidding. I don't have anything to sell. But truly, I think creativity actually is for everyone. Humans like to label people a lot, whether it be smart, dumb, preppy, ghetto, this, that, et cetera.

And maybe those labels are even true sometimes. But I think creativity is a little different, though. What we often label as creative is more often abstract. When I see something really out there, I might call it creative, but really, I think you have two types of creativity. Or rather, maybe creativity lies on a kind of a spectrum.

On one end would be people that prefer to be creative within an existing set of rules, and on the other end would be people that like to pull more from the unknown. Some people like watching football, and some people like abstract art. They're both creative expressions in their own way. What seems to really make us creative, though, is less a reflection of our affinity for the abstract and more so how much time we choose to spend trying to exercise creativity.

I heard once that creativity is a discipline, which tracks in my experience. Truly creative people, in my mind, are not magically gifted with creative genius. Rather, they're the ones that are intentionally finding time to spend being creative. Once upon a time, I took some pride in labeling myself as a creative person.

In my mind, I was creative and other people were not so much. But it seemed to me like every time I would claim to be creative and explain the evidence for why I felt like I was gifted, whoever I happened to be talking to at the time would want to show me evidence of how they were creatively gifted.

And more often than not, I walked away feeling a little less special than I first thought I was. Maybe there was an element of keeping up going on, but the truth was that I wasn't truly some special creative person. I now believe that we are as creative as we choose to be. I really think some people are truly creative, but I base that off of how much time they dedicate to actually being creative.

I've just had too many, quote, "non-creative" people demonstrate to me the ability to be quite creative when they choose to. So, on some level, I still consider myself to be a creative person, but mostly just because I enjoy spending more time in that creative space than other people I know. Nobody is just special because they are.

What makes them special is what they do. And by virtue of being a human, you are in fact creative. But becoming gifted at creating, you need to make real efforts to spend time being creative. Now, I think there is such a thing as good creativity. Even though we're all inherently creative, some people's creativity serves more of a useful purpose than others.

If our creativity doesn't accomplish something, it may even be fair to say it wasn't creative at all. Static noise is creative in a sense. It's putting together all kinds of sounds that have never been put together before. It's also useless. The things that are truly creative combine the unknown with the known and make something useful.

Maybe the thing that your creativity is trying to accomplish is getting a football into an end zone or evoking a feeling in others through a piece of art. Either way, that creativity is serving a purpose. I could spout off random words and call it poetry, but I'm not sure it would be fair to call that creative, even though I could argue that it's very creative.

Because creativity requires a purpose, the measure of its quality is tied to how well it accomplishes its purpose. For this reason, creativity truly does require a certain amount of discipline and effort to give it any worth. My hope is that you don't just assume you're not creative and give up on making efforts to create.

Maybe you're not drawn to abstract art. Maybe you don't write songs. Maybe you don't paint or make films or sit around talking about inspiration. But you still constantly solve problems. You make decisions, you explain things, you build routines, you tell stories, you make a life out of the raw material that you were given. 

The question is not whether or not you are creative. The question is whether you are willing to practice creativity on purpose. Because creativity is one of the best ways for us to be useful, to feel alive, and to grow as a person. This is Skipping Stones - “Creativity Is for Everyone!”. You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts.

For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonesr.com and if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me at info@skippingstonesr.com. New episodes will be released weekly every Monday.