Are you creative? Are you NOT creative? What is being creative anyway? Is being creative a necessary ingredient to being happy? Are you somehow a diminished human being if you are not creative?
I don’t feel I fall into most stereotypical depictions of “creative.” I don’t draw or paint or sew or knit or write (except on the Dope and some witty Facebook posts).
I’ve tried my hand at all those things and they just didn’t seem worth the trouble.
I do however dance every week with a group of people who get together to just dance however we feel like dancing. Does that count as creative? There’s no choreography. I’m not doing a performance for others, just moving how my body wants to move.
I feel like I’m a creative problem solver, do I get points for that? If somebody was a good conversationalist who made you laugh often and was always a pleasure to be around, are they being creative?
I do think being creative is an important element in living a fullfilled life. I also believe that creativeness can be expressed in any number of ways. Mathematics is just as creative as any other art form as far as I am concerned. Finding creative solutions to any type of problem is creative. I feel like the act of being creative adds a very important element to our basic identity. It has very elevating affects on our mood and general personna. Lots of good things happen when we let ourselves be creative.
It’s a “Good Thing” that can make life richer. It’s like having a good hobby, or a good romance, or a good job. It’s like enjoying good food, or reading good books. If you do these things, you’re living a better life than if you don’t do these things.
Yes, a person can live a perfectly valid, happy, contented, productive life without any form of creativity. But add creativity to the mix, and life is better.
This is why arts classes should be retained in the schools, even in times of budget cuts. As James Thurber said, “Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy and wealthy and dead.” As Ray Bradbury said, “We need our arts so we won’t die of truth.”
Dancing is creative. You’re taking one thing (your body) and transforming into something else (what I call visual music).
I don’t think being creative requires artistic ability. It’s all about how easy it is for your brain to come up with original, off-script ideas. A person who is highly creative has a constant flow of ideas and associations, and they tend to be a bit disinhibited in their thought processes. Like, they’ll be the one person in the meeting who isn’t afraid to throw out the crazy plan that only the boss likes. This can set them apart sometimes, but creative people are kinda innocently arrogant and just don’t give a fuck.
A person who has lots of opinions doesn’t interest me nearly as much as the person who has lots of ideas.
I’m always in my best mood when I’ve got a new idea a-brewing. My creativity frequently manifests itself in visual art, but I also get to see it at work, through numbers and words. Which is probably why I am not too bored on the job.
Is it a very important thing? Well, to me it is. I’m very cerebral and can’t imagine not living in my head. Plus, being disinhibited comes with some downsides; being creative is a fair trade-off, I think. However, some would say being kind and generous and loving are more important. I say as long as you have some route to happiness and contentment, it really doesn’t matter what you are.
It’s almost the most important thing about being alive, for me.
My results are hardly ever grand, or of superb quality, or important or interesting to anyone but me, but I do try very hard to think and act creatively.
It’s a pain in the ass for the vast majority who try to live off it, a huge boon for those who win the economic lottery in various creative fields. For hobbyists, it’s really quite rewarding. So overall, good for most folks, damaging to various degrees for most artists, writers, musicians and so forth who try to live off their skills.
IMHO everyone is creative in some way, just like everyone is intelligent in some way, or everyone is motivated in some way…it just might not be apparent to others.
But I think most people understand creativity to be in traditional artistic/performance fields. Using that definition then my answer would be no, it not important for everyone to be creative in traditional artistic/performance fields. That would be like insisting it is important that everyone be adept at some sport - for some people it’s just not in the cards.
All that said, I would say that if YOU are creative then it IS important to engage in creative endeavors and try to be around other creative people. I speak from personal experience…
Eh, lots of people who do those things aren’t creative–they follow patterns slavishly, often right down to the color choices, and never really put their own stamp on whatever they’re making. My aunt Barbara is like that–she can make quilt and do ceramics and weave baskets and do cross-stitch, all of them with absolutely beautiful results. But she works solely from patterns someone else has laid out with no tweaking, ever. There is never a moment when she says to herself, “I wonder what would happen if I did this?”
If you ask yourself that question, you’re creative no matter what it is you’re asking that question about. If you don’t ask it, you’re not, I don’t care how many “creative” or “artistic” hobbies you have.
I think dance is the purist form of expression because your body is your tool, not a paintbrush or a musical instrument or a pen—or even your vocal chords. But I think everybody is creative in some way or another, even if it’s “just” in something like problem solving. It all enhances life in ways meaningful to us.
Not sure if our views are contrarian or just viewed through differing prisms… I look at my creativity as a way of standing out from the herd, a feeling of uniqueness.
Of course, 6 thousand years of recorded history does increase the difficulty level in finding une nouvelle méthodologie de dépeçage de chat …
If I even thought about “standing out from the herd,” I’d have to care what the herd is doing . . . and I don’t. I rarely go to galleries or contemporary museums, because most of what I see just bores me. And regarding “uniqueness,” I assume that what I do is unique, because it’s a very challenging juxtaposition of media, with a great deal of experimental planning on the computer before I even start each piece. But if it’s not unique, that wouldn’t affect me one way or another. I just do what I do, and that’s all that matters.
Absolutely. And you can be creative in almost any field. The world seems divided between those who do things they way they’ve been done, and are happy with it, and those who keep trying to find new ideas and new ways of doing things. Fiction writing, column writing, and programming all come from the same place
Creavity is important to me, and it is an aspect of my personality that I’m most pleased about. I consider it an innate characteristic, though, and so I don’t judge others for not being highly creative.
The benefit of being creative is that it allows you to escape boredom pretty easily, at least relative to someone who is not particularly creative. On a rainy Sunday, you can find yourself doing all kinds of projects, or at least daydreaming about potential projects. If you’re artistically inclined, merely seeing a random color next to another color can provoke you to create something brilliant and personally satisfying. If you’re scientifically inclined, you may find yourself having epiphanies in the shower about what your next subject of research will be. Having these bursts of inspiration are priceless to me. Without them, I’d have to passively consume other people’s creations without having anything to share in return, and I can’t imagine not being at least a little sad about that.
That said, for every producer in the world, there needs to be a consumer. An imbalance could occur if everyone were highly creative. So maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be less creative than others.
Yes, these are both indicators of creativity to me.
Having the imagination to take a conversation away from say, the weather, to a more engaging topic such as human personality quirks (“Isn’t it funny how our small talk always revolves around the weather? What’s up with that? And now I sound like Jerry Seinfield!”) requires a certain mental spontaneity that creative types have.
A good conversationalist is usually a good storyteller, and it would be silly to say storytellers aren’t creative.
Interesting question. Virtually all of human progress is rooted in creativity. As a science type, where have my contributions come from? Well…inside my head. I observe, and then imagine causes, boundaries, effects, applications, ways to test observations, and so on.
Creativity is not the exclusive property of the arts. Salesmen, teachers, bonsai gardeners, woodworking hobbyists, inebriated pizza cooks, teenagers wanting to look different…all exhibit creativity. Creativity is the human aspect that in great part defines us as human, but all of us are human in that regard.
(From a retired scientist who “creates” new hybrid cultivars of flowering plants)