We are all uniquely creative.
I’ve been making art for more than four decades and teaching art for nearly three, and I’ve become very passionate about creativity, and I am very interested in helping others tap into their creativity. Unfortunately, many folks simply believe that they are not creative and the world is divided into creatives and non-creatives, with the latter group making up the larger percentage of the population since creativity is reserved for only “special” people.
I can’t help thinking of my own journey. Creativity wasn’t ever really mentioned or talked about—not in my art classes in middle and high school—not in my drawing, painting, sculpture, or design classes in college—not in my art education classes as I learned about teaching art. Creativity was just taken for granted, and either you had it or you didn’t. When I heard artists, musicians, and film makers talk about creativity, it was always this very aloof thing. It was magical and mystical, and they talked of the muse landing on their shoulder and whispering inspiration into their ears. Or they talked of divine inspiration coming down from heaven above.
Creativity was never presented as a practical thing, and only special people could tap into its ethereal magic.
But what if I said that creativity is practical, that you didn’t have to be special, and in fact, that each and everyone of us is creative. We have just lost touch with it, but each one of us is a fountain of amazing creativity. Most of us have just been turned off from it, but it’s there inside of us. We just have to tap into it.
How do I know this? How do I know that everyone is creative?
Let’s look at children. If you have children, teach children, know children, or have any experience with children, especially around the ages of five and six, you know how they are bubbling over with curiosity and energy. They draw with fearlessness. They break out into song and dance at any moment. They build and they play. They are little, creative machines. One study has found that 98% of five year olds score at the creative genius level, while the same study found that only 2% of adults do.
What happens to us as we grow up and grow older?
How do all of these astonishingly creative little people grow up to people who only see themselves as utterly uncreative? We were all immensely creative as young kids, full of inquisitive tenacity, and we were fearless with our creative energies. Along the way, though, we’ve reigned it in, pulled it back, and denied it. The majority of us go about our daily lives believing that we are in no way creative. We’re not like da Vinci, Beethoven, Einstein, or Madame Curie. We won’t make any major breakthroughs or create masterpieces that will live on for hundreds of years. But really, who will? It doesn’t mean that we’re not creative because we’ll never be creative geniuses that are remembered throughout history. But we are all uniquely creative.
I want to tell you a story—a true story about growing up in a rural area just south of Pittsburgh. I didn’t grow up in what most people would describe as a creative family. I wasn’t surrounded by musicians and artists. My dad worked in a feed mill and later became a truck driver, and my mom worked in the bakery department of a grocery store. I grew up playing baseball and football and roaming the acres of woods that surrounded our house. But I also grew up drawing. I loved to draw. I didn’t have artists in the family to look up to, but I had my parents.
Looking back, I see now that it was a remarkably creative environment. We were poor, and when you’re poor, you have to be creative by necessity. We couldn’t always afford new stuff, and one of my earliest memories was making Christmas decorations with my mom. She had a stack of construction paper, and showed my sister, my brother, and me how to make paper chains, snowmen, Santa Clauses, and Christmas trees. She didn’t have a how-to book, and this was back in the dark ages before the Internet and YouTube. She figured it all out on her own so that we would have Christmas decorations that year.
I remember my dad fixing everything in the house. The dryer would stop drying clothes, and my dad would take it apart, figure out what was wrong, get the correct part and fix it. The car didn’t pass inspection because of bad brakes or big rusty holes in the fender, my dad would figure out how to put new brakes on, or how to patch up the holes in the fender with some sheet metal, a pop rivet gun, and some Bondo. He just figured it out.
This is what I saw all the time growing up, as my parents figured out creative ways to solve problems and fix things because we were poor and couldn’t always afford new things or to get things repaired professionally. Even though, my parents never considered themselves creative, and they were only doing what they had to do, they consistently used their creativity, and that was my environment growing up.
Imagine if we all could recognize how we use our creativity in practical, everyday ways. Imagine if creativity wasn’t such a mystical and mysterious thing, and we didn’t have to wait around for the muse or for divinity, and we could just tap into our creativity whenever we wanted. Image if we could harness that creative exuberance that we all had as kids, and use that power as adults.
How would our world be different?
But here’s the thing. We can. We can tap into our creativity. We can use that power of childhood creative curiosity as adults. We don’t have to wait around for the muse to land on our shoulder or listen for a divine voice on the wind. We are all uniquely creative, and we can impact this world in extraordinary ways when we accept and embrace our creativity.
We just have to consistently show up and get work.