Creativity and Personal Growth
Our schools rarely treat creativity as something that matters. The emphasis falls on memorizing facts and doing well on exams, and maybe that is exactly where the trouble begins. People accept that creativity and innovation feed into entrepreneurship, yet almost no one considered that you might cultivate those qualities in a young person. The assumption was that creative drive marked somebody born gifted. What follows is a look at how putting your own creativity to use can signal real self-development.
The process tends to move through a few stages. It begins in imagination. Geniuses lean toward the imaginative, sometimes to the point where ordinary people keep their distance, half-convinced the person is unwell. Plenty of psychiatrists will admit that a large share of patients carrying some mental illness diagnosis actually test above average in intelligence and show strong imaginative ability. Imagination, after all, is the capacity to picture something that does not yet exist.
Being creative means acting on that imagination when a problem stands in front of you. Innovation takes the creative act further, shaping solutions to the problem that are particular to the person solving it. Entrepreneurship arrives when someone is innovative enough to move others with their ideas, bringing at least one person along. None of that promises wealth or even success. History is full of inventive, entrepreneurial people who were never taken seriously. A lot depends on whose attention you catch, and what happens next.
Teaching creativity is far simpler with a young child in the early school years. You do it by noticing the particular traits each student carries and letting them tackle problems in their own way. The harder cases are the adults who reach a point of heartache and regret because they never let their potential out. For them it takes a real commitment to growth, some grasp of basic psychology, and enough time spent getting to know themselves to work out what actually makes them different. What is it that separates you from everyone else?
Historically, creative people were often nonconformists, willing to stick out in a crowd so they could do something remarkable that ran against the grain. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs come to mind. Many people forget Gates dropped out of Harvard. So did Mark Zuckerberg, who went on to start Facebook.
So why do most of us conform? There is a built-in pull toward the path of least resistance. It is genuinely the easier route, because standing out makes most people uncomfortable. The handful who take the risk get mocked and called crazy, right up until they win, at which point everybody suddenly wants to be close to them.
Stepping out and applying your own creativity to your own problems usually requires reaching a place where you feel you have no other option. Say you are stuck in a job you can't stand. You decide whether you truly want a career there, then get inventive enough to impress the people above you so they promote you. Or you build up enough savings to walk away and work for yourself. Often it makes sense to run the new thing on the side first, so you have some footing before you leap.
Robert Frost wrote about exactly this kind of choice in "The Road Not Taken." The closing line credits the road less travelled with making all the difference in the writer's life. Still, creativity and innovation and the entrepreneurship they lead to are not reserved for a chosen few. Those who seem to have them are simply the ones bold enough to commit to their own development and do whatever the dream demanded.
Every person is made once and carries something in them capable of leaving a mark. It makes you wonder what the world would look like if the road not taken became the one most people chose, if enough of us recognized our own potential and finally moved toward what we wanted.
- Erwin Wooten