Creativity

What is Creativity?

Creativity is the state or quality of being creative. The ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, and interpretations.

Some synonyms for creativity are ingenuity, resourcefulness, originality, imagination, cleverness, inventiveness, vision, and inspiration.

Thoughts

Creativity is commonly connected with artistic achievements such as paintings, poetry, and songwriting. It is technically a form of intelligence that inspires people in many different disciplines to discover something new. Creativity can be seen in every area of life; from the way you decorate your home to the way you get to school or work. Imagine automobiles, highways, and bridges. Think of trains, tracks, and stations. As you may presume, much thought has gone into the design and development of these significant, necessary, and well-traveled areas of our everyday life.

From a psychological school of thought, the definition of creativity includes two parts, originality and functionality. Perhaps a closer characterization of the concept of creativity comes from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In regards to patent prosecution, criteria used to consider the creativity of a design include novelty, utility, and surprise. From the Mindful Helpdesk perspective, these blogs are written to arouse the reader to creatively contemplate and uncover their own wisdom of the words presented.

Creativity usually involves some sort of creative process. This creative process is the development of an original idea through its path from thought to the final output. This progression of the creative approach customarily grows through a five-step process. These five steps include preparation, incubation, illumination, evaluation, and verification. Without going into too much detail, briefly exploring this creative process implies that at the first stage, there is some sort of preparation in the development of an idea. For example, you may be looking for a solution to catch a mouse. In the second stage, the idea percolates in your mind. What is the behavior of the mouse, what are its habits, how might one lure the mouse, what should be done once it’s caught? Then, a light bulb may go off in your mind after incubation. This third stage is called illumination. After that, in steps four and five, you evaluate your concept against other ideas and verify that it works. This is just a simple example of the creative process of building a mousetrap. While many creative processes follow a similar path, not all creative ideas are trying to find a solution or solve a problem.

Does every creative process involve all five steps? No. What about creating a simple poem? There’s no problem to be solved. Methinks there is more rhyme than reason. Perhaps a muse was implicated or instrumental in the creation process. The word muse is defined as a source of an artist’s inspiration. From Greek mythology, there were nine muses, goddesses of various arts such as music, dance, and poetry. There’s also divine inspiration, which may just be a religious description of the same concept of a muse. Divine inspiration is the “concept of a supernatural force, typically a deity, causing a person or people to experience a creative desire.”

There’s just so much that goes into describing and understanding creativity. There are many different levels of creative individuals, whether it’s creating a cute poem or developing a vaccine to eliminate a disease. And, the creative process may stem from a detailed procedure to unknown inspiration. We all have the ability to create. Hopefully, this blog will help you to contemplate your creativity and inspire you to share your talent with a loved one.

Celebrate Creativity & Inspiration

Quotes

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
~Maya Angelou

Creativity takes courage.”
~Henri Matisse

“Creativity is a gift. It doesn’t come through if the air is cluttered.”
~John Lennon

“Creativity is intelligence having fun”
~Anonymous