Yesterday I was reading this post from @cryptoctopus in which he shares his point of view about a certain lack of beauty (which might be the same as saying, a lack of creativity) in our world today.
Since that subject is quite complex, I decided to first approach it with this post, sharing my thoughts about an important aspect in our every day life, which is, our creativity, or our ability to create incredible things.
What is creativity all about?
Creativity is one of the most sophisticated processes of our brain, it allows us to create the most special, complex and transcendent human activities, to the delight of everyone else.
It is defined as follows:
Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Creativity is characterised by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions. | Source
Creativity is one of the character strengths, along with curiosity, judgment, love of learning and perspective, which define the virtue of wisdom and knowledge. All of these are cognitive strengths which entail acquiring and applying knowledge. | Source
Creativity is an indispensable quality from which it is possible to obtain all that wealth of resources that are "asleep" in our psyche, in order to carry out our actions and projects in the best way possible
The act of creating is an essential characteristic of the human being. It is thanks to the concept of creation, in which something that didn’t existed, now exists. And it is us humans being who have the power to create and modify the nature of the things that will serve us in anyway we choose.
When we look at the history of creativity, we found the enormous progress in the last century, with discoveries and developments that completely changed the way we understand our world, such as the theory of relativity, or quantum mechanics, among many other discoveries.
Creativity doesn’t have a constant development. There are certain irregularities in the emergence of it. There are historical times in which creativity is greater (like the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment) and others in which the creativity and discoveries are pretty much zero (like the Dark Ages). In this sense, it could be said that creativity, both in us humans and in our historical creations, advances by leaps. These can be observed both in the artistic creation itself, and in its technique.
Creativity today
Today, thanks to the Internet, and in particular social networks like steemit, we live in a world that is not only constantly connected, but it also requires us to be permanently connected, and that is a great distraction not only in labor issues, but also in our creative process, since in my opinion this constant attention leaves us with very little time of concentration for tasks that by their nature some require time for creativity to manifest itself.
Note that perhaps this is compensated for by the fact that on the other hand technologies allow us to discover new things at a previously unimaginable rate (such as new works of art, or new business models, or new creative videos), which gives us more ideas to be creative, but at the end of the day, I'm not so sure that the balance tilts in favor of technology in this case.
Another factor we should take into consideration, is that parenting has also change with the years. As @getonthetrain explained on a post several days ago, today there are a lot of parents that overprotect their children, and a possible side effect could be a lack of development in the creative part of our brain, caused by a lack of “discovery time”, which is nothing more than when the kids go out to play on the street and hang around visiting new places on their own.
Now, depending on what we consider creativity, it could also be argued that we are more creative than never before, simply because the fact we have never enjoy so much constant discoveries and innovation in every aspect of our lives.
If something like the LHC and its discoveries makes us feel very excited, could we call that some sort of art? Can science ever be artistic?
Creativity and our mind state
Creativity is divided into 2 types, called “bic-C” and “little-C”
Little-c creativity, which is often used as an indicator of mental health, includes everyday problem-solving and the ability to adapt to change. Big-C creativity, on the other hand, is far more rare. It occurs when a person solves a problem or creates an object that has a major impact on how other people think, feel and live their lives. | Source
The creative person is able to accept and overcome all kinds of circumstances even if they seem uncomfortable thanks to the cleverness that goes hand in hand with creativity, giving the opportunity to new experiences and making the most of previously acquired knowledge and ideas that facilitate the opportunity to modify and innovate his/her particular reality.
What is innovation?
Innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved product, service or process that creates value for business, government or society. | Source
Because of that, a creative person will have no problem in identifying good innovative ideas from bad ideas, and also would know how to apply them in real life and start taking action based on that. Creativity can be considered as the ability to put together some aspects of different objects in different ways, in order to obtain new products, new ideas, or simply a new creation of some sort.
We all have creativity, it is the same one that keeps changing our perspectives of the world, it only depends on the ideas that prowl our minds when difficulties arise in life and they produce changes to satisfy those needs. Creativity is not something exclusive of some individuals, because to some extent, we all have it, but we certainly develop it in different ways and at different rates.
How can we increase our creativity?
Your ability to generate innovative ideas is not merely a function of the mind, but also a function of five key behaviours that optimize your brain for discovery Source :
- "Associating" Source : by starting to associate information that wasn't previously related in our brain, we will be able to not only take our knowledge and our understanding a little bit further, but we would also end up having faster thoughts as well. In my case what I like to do from time to time is to connect some ideas and compare them with soccer psychology, simply because the fact I enjoy soccer a lot. But every person could associate thoughts however they want.
'Questioning" Source : this pretty is self explanatory, it simply consists in looking for the explanation behind things. Searching for its causes, and understanding the correspondent consequence.
"Observing" Source : this is key if we want to be life long learners. Observing is the easiest way to learn something, especially if we take the time to observe people who are really great at what they do, so we can learn from them.
"Networking" Source : knowing new people is always good. The most interesting people we know, the more contact we will have with good ideas and intriguing perspectives.
"Experimenting" Source : sometimes we just need to get out of our comfort and try new things. Especially if we are getting bored or feeling stuck, the solution is to do something that normally we would not do.
Conclusion
Human beings are constantly changing, our development begins before birth and does not stop until we reach old age, in this process the body of course, changes, the intellect develops, our emotions get more complex and we learn how to interact with each other.
It will always be good to find ways to develop our creativity, since it will allow us to create something new based on other interesting ideas, that is, the ability to analyze and evaluate new ideas, and the ability to solve problems that are present in the course of our lives and the challenges we might find, whether they are academic, professional or even personal challenges.
Truth is, creativity will always be appreciated by our society, and when there seem to be a lack of it we would end up noticing.
Do you think there is a lack of creativity in our society?
If so, why do you think is the cause?
References
apa.org - creativity
positivepsychology - creativity
creativityatwork – what is creativity
psychologytoday - creativity
allpsychologycareers - psychology of creativity
Image sources
All images are from pixabay
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