Creativity
So many people say to me that they’re not creative. They are wrong, totally wrong.
If you are alive, and can string two thoughts together, you are creative.
There is something fundamental about human creativity. We need it to survive, and it can lead us to thrive.
Creativity isn’t just about being able to play jazz drums, or paint a portrait, or throw a beautiful pot or design a greener building.
Creativity is about making something that didn’t exist before, or just finding a way to solve a problem.
When you take a photo with your phone, even if you don’t think it’s much cop, that’s creative.
When you cook a meal, that’s creative.
When you fix someone’s computer or car, that’s creative.
Writing a response to this blog is creative.
Not only is creativity essential to our physical selves, it’s crucial to our intellectual and emotional selves.
Consuming creative work nourishes us
We all have a very deep human need to nourish our bodies, minds and feelings with experiences of the world.
One way of doing that is to absorb what other people have created – a bag of chips from the chippy, a book by our favourite author, the latest Adele single, the newest Netflix drama, a training programme to get our bodies fitter.
Not only do we all need to consume what others have created to live in our modern society, but it can give us much joy and by paying for what others create, we can enable them to keep on creating. .
Creating nourishes us even more
But we all get a different feeling of mental and emotional nourishment when we create. It could be picking and eating that first carrot from a vegetable bed we’ve sown. It can be feeling the smoothness of a wooden bowl we’ve just turned. It can be the satisfaction of putting on a garment that we’ve just made.
More than that, when we create something for others to enjoy or use, we are enriching other people’s lives.
I can get great satisfaction from photographing a flower at dusk in a particularly ethereal way. You may get satisfaction by creating something else – and the forms of creativity are infinite.
I get a lot of deep satisfaction from writing, filming, photographing or editing something that resonates with another person.
Our commercial creative work helps people to connect with customers, or educate others. And that sharing and connecting part of our creative processes gives us immense fulfilment, and provides a service that we know dozens of our clients appreciate, and many thousands of their audience members will gain value from.
What are you going to create this week?
