Why Creativity Is About Nuture Not Nature

Words
989
Reading
5 min
8y
Listen to this post
~7 min

pexels-photo.jpg


For ages, Creativity is something that Humans have always believed to be in the possession of a few set of people

Ranging from the Greeks who believed that creativity was a divine serving spirit(daemons) which possesses certain Humans and make them extra special, to the Romans who had a much similar narrative, but in their case the spirit was called a Genius

Hundreds of years down the Line, this narrative still hold sway but it now has a new twist. Creativity is no longer attributed to spirits, but to unique Individuals. We believe that only Humans like Steven Hawkings and Elon Musk have that creative genius

So I ask : Is the rest of the world dumb?

Is the layman not capable of creativity, or is it something like blue eyes or a perfect shape which is genetically a property of the privileged few

The truth is that Creativity is not in possession of a privileged few, you too can be creative if you chose to be. There are certain behaviors and mindset that can help you achieve Creativity and I will be outlining them in this post


pexels-photo (2).jpg


Steal Like An Artist

If you are someone who wants to really hone your creativity, Austin Kleon's Steal Like An Artist is a book I will reccomend you to read. Even if you cannot get your hands on the book I will advice you to read the summary online

You will find out that nothing comes from nowhere, everything new has a source.

It is all about remixing existing works and adding your own bit of spark to it.The right fusion will always bring out something unique even though it is not completely original

When people call something 'Original', nine out of ten times they just don't know the refrences or the original sources Invovled Jonathan Lethem

The path to a creative world is learning to steal like an Artist


pexels-photo-221538.jpeg


Seek And You Shall Find

For you to find something worth stealing you have to serach for it. The quality of your input is what determines the quality of your output

You will always manifest what you internalize. Research is one of the most Important thing for you on your creative journey. I am always amazed on how people get stuck on some simple problems a simple Google search can solve

A lot of people spend lots of money on technicians and engineers on small problems that they could have solved for themselves if they chose to seek out Information regarding the problem

Look for the great people in your field or niche and study their work, study the work of the people who they learnt from too. Go as far back in time as possible and learn, that the key to seeking out knowledge


pexels-photo-697662.jpeg


Explore

It is very easy for You to develop one view of the world when you work for so long with a particular method. It is a kind of shortcut the Human Brain develops to speed up the thinking process

The downside is that you will become more single eyed and less receptive to new ideas. You will find it harder to respond to change

He that is good with the Hammer tends to think everything is a Nail . Abraham Maslow

You will have to seek out new ways of doing things and this does not mean you should craft new principles , You just have to fine tune existing thing that works and apply them

Google Search results was built very similar to Academic Publishing where the most valuable resources gets shown first based on the amount of Citations(back links ) they have

Original and Creative solutions are not crafted from thin air, you just have to find the right ideas and work on combining them

James Altucher calls it idea sex


pexels-photo-636243.jpeg


Never Stop Creating

When people ask me how I learnt to write so well. I tell them it is consistency that helped me get this far. I still get angry whenever I go days without writing, thats what got me this far

Consistency helps you get better over time. I know this because whenever I go back to read my older post, they look very bad to me. Most time I don't believe that I was writing so badly in the past, but I still see comments on those post of people who thanked me because the post was so 'good'

Men like Thomas Edison are famous for their endless experiments. The light bulb took hundreds of experiments to work. Thomas Edison has a record of 1090 patents and I don't see anyone breaking that anytime soon

Picasso the famous painter has over 20,000 artworks in his name

Like everything in Life there is no certainty of what will be a hit. You even experience it here on Steemit, the posts you pour out time and energy into mostly make nothing, but the ones you just wrote to fulfill all righteousness are the ones who hit big

You cannot eliminate Quantity in the road to Quality.

Quantity breeds quality, the process of creating something no matter how bad it might look helps you in creating soemthing better next time

Just Create


blue-red-painted-brick-68510.jpeg


While creativity does not come easily, but when you start working towards it, it it becomes like a second nature for you

While it may be hard for you to measure your creativity, the goal is continuous Improvement and you also need to create a ritual for yourself to make the work process faster

When it comes to content creation there are some steps I take to find Inspiration and it is always a combination of the steps I outlined above

Creativity is a process, and creating and following a system will help you get there faster, you just have to put in the work


Thanks For Reading

Image Source


Follow ogochukwu@ogochukwu

Why Creativity Is About Nuture Not Nature | Ecency