Creativity: Event or Process

By: Thokchom Stalin
The creative process is the act of making new connections between concepts. Creative thinking is not about generating something new from a blank slate, but rather about taking what is already present and combining those bits and pieces in a way that has not been done previously.
In 1666, while standing under the shade of an apple tree, Sir Isaac Newton saw an apple fall to the ground. Newton wondered, “Why should that apple always fall straight to the ground?”- Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth center? There must be something drawing power that the earth draws. And thus, the concept of GRAVITY was born.
The falling of apples has become one of the lasting and iconic examples of creative moments. But most of the people forget that Newton worked on his idea about GRAVITY for nearly twenty years until, in 1687, he published his book, THE PRINCIPIA: MATHEMATICAL PRINCIPLES OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. The incident of the falling apple was just the beginning of a thought that continued for decades. Newton isn’t the only one to wrestle with a great idea for years. Creative thinking is a process for all of us.
In these articles, I’ll share the science of creative thinking. In the 1960s, a researcher named George Land conducted a study of 1,600 five years old and 98 percent of the children scored in the “HIGHLY CREATIVE” range. Dr. Land re-tested each subject during five year increments. When the same children were 10 years old, only 30 percent scored in the highly creative range. This number dropped to 12 percent by the age 15 and just 2 percent by the age 25. As the children grew into adults they effectively had creativity trained out of them. In the words of Dr. Land, “non-creative behavior is learned”.
This is not saying that creativity is 100 percent learned. Genetics do play a role. According to psychology professor Barbara Kerr,” approximately 22 percent of the variance is due to the influence of genes”. This discovery was made by studying the differences in creative thinking between sets of twins. Some people claiming that “I’m just not the creative type” are a pretty weak excuse for avoiding creative thinking. Certainly, some people are primed to be more creative than others. However, nearly every person is born with some level of creative skill and the majority of our creative thinking abilities are trainable.
People think that intelligence and creative thinking are very related. Being in the top 1 percent of intelligence has no correlation with being fantastically creative. Instead, you simply have to be SMART not a GENIUS and then work hard, practice deliberately and put into work. In the words of a researcher from a 2013 study, “we obtained evidence that once the intelligence threshold is met, personality factors become more predictive for creativity”.
What exactly are these “personality factors” that researchers are referring to when it comes to boosting your creative thinking?
One of the most critical components is how we view our talents internally. More specifically, our creative skills are largely determined by whether we approach the creative process with a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. The basic idea is that when we use a fixed mindset we approach tasks as if our talents and abilities are fixed and unchanging. In a growth mindset however, we believe that our abilities can be improved with effort and practice. Interestingly, we can easily judge ourselves in our direction or another based on how we talk about and praise our efforts.
How can we apply the growth mindset to creativity in practical terms? In my experience, it comes down to one thing: the willingness to be bad when pursuing an activity. The growth mindset is focused more on the process than outcome. This is easy to accept in theory, but very hard to stick to in practice. Most people don’t want to deal with the accompanying embarrassment or shame that is often required to learn a new skill.
The list of mistakes that we can never recover from is very short. I think most of us realize this on some level. We know that our lives will not be destroyed if that book we write doesn’t sell or if we get turned down by a potential date or if we forget someone’s name when we introduce them. It’s not necessarily what comes after the event that worries us. It’s the possibility of looking stupid, felling humiliated, or dealing with embarrassment along the way that prevent us from getting started at all.
I always say that “CREATIVITY is not an EVENT, it’s a PROCESS”. It’s not just a eureka moment. We have to work through mental barriers and internal blocks. We have to commit to practicing our craft deliberately. And we have to stick with the process for years; perhaps even decades like Newton did, in order to see our creative genius blossom.
(The writer is an ex-student of Alva’s College, Moodbidri and currently a student in the Oratory Academy for his IELTS exam, as he will study his MBA in University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada).