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From the course: Practical Creativity for Everyone

Debunking the myths about creativity that hold you back

From the course: Practical Creativity for Everyone

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Debunking the myths about creativity that hold you back

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- Let me start by asking you a quick question. What is creativity? You may want to pause the video for a couple of minutes while you write down an answer. I did this exercise online and I got hundreds of responses, and they were quite revealing. Let's get started by debunking some of the misunderstandings that can hold you back from your full idea-generating potential. The first is that creativity is a God-given ability or a gift, that some people have it and others don't. Having great ideas is actually more about input than talent. If you don't fill your mind with valuable input, you won't have valuable output, or as computer programmers would say, garbage in, garbage out, so don't be a trash collector. Another misunderstanding is that creativity equals art. I would say that art involves creativity, but creativity doesn't necessarily need to involve anything arty. Art has a really important role in society, but the wheel, money, and the concept of democracy probably didn't start as artistic projects. Some people also state that you have to be a genius or an expert. This just isn't true. Admittedly, you need to have a level of knowledge to be able to understand a problem and to start generating ideas, but expertise can actually work against you. Knowing too much about a subject tends to lock you in to existing ways of doing things and cause you to make too many assumptions. That's bad for ideas. Let's knock a final one on its head. This time, it's the idea that creativity is a single skill. It's not. It's a portfolio of lots of different skills like organizing, remembering, imagining, analyzing, combining, judging. You won't be equally strong in all of them, but that's okay. It's our differences that result in wonderfully different approaches. We should celebrate that.

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