What is Creativity?
I’ve been struggling with the direction of this blog since the beginning. Well, maybe struggling is too harsh. Pondering, perhaps.
At first, I had it on my now-defunct StrongWhitePapers website, simply because I had just designed the website and work-flow-wise, it just made sense to add it to that site. I thought at first I’d write about white papers, but I didn’t want to be too limited in my scope. After all, I offer many services, not just white paper writing.
Now that I’ve centralized everything including my blog on my main website, the question still hangs out there. Do I write about writing? Do I write about marketing? Do I write about purple widgets? I’ve written about all of them so far. But I think I want to start homing in on a niche topic.
What all of these things have in common — and indeed what many blogs dance around but not delve into — is creativity. This is a topic that really interests me. What is creativity? How do we “unleash” our creativity? Do you have to be “creative-type” to be Creative?
Linda Naiman, an expert in arts-based learning, described creativity as the act of turning ideas into reality. “If you have ideas, but don’t act on them, you are imaginative but not creative,” she says.
That’s an interesting concept. You have to build on an idea — you have to create. Seems kind of obvious, when you think about it. But that is one key way that we are different from (most) of the other animals on this planet. Our ability to see the possibilities and form our reality based on what we can imagine is at the heart of what makes us human.
Of course, this is going down too much of an anthropological path. I want to find out how creativity helps us in everyday life, mostly as it pertains to the workplace. I want to find those nuggets of creativity that make our world a better place, and find out how we all can inject our own creativity.
I hope you all come along for the ride. I think it will be interesting at the very least.
But in the meantime, what does creativity mean to you? Let me know in the comment section below!
~Graham
Tags: arts-based learning, creativity, GrahamStrong.com, Linda Naiman, StrongWhitePapers
