60 Ways to Boost Your Creativity

What is Creativity?

Unfortunately, very few people truly understand the meaning of the word "creative". Most think it's synonymous with the word "artistic", and that you must have some innate or learned artistic talent or skill, or even a degree in traditional media and artistic techniques. That's hogwash.

Creativity is not "artistic skill". It is the ability to solve a problem. When a painter sits to paint a landscape, she's not just painting a picture of what she sees (either in front of her or in her mind's eye); she's trying to solve a problem. Perhaps the problem is, "How do I use these paints to represent this scene as accurately as possible?" Or perhaps she wants to imitate the style of a well-known artist, like Matisse, or Van Gogh. No matter. She has a goal. She wants to put what is in her head on the canvas or paper.

People who believe they have little or no "artistic skill" solve problems every day. For example, a computer programmer is creative if she writes a program to accomplish a task. She may not be able to draw a stick figure very well, but she is still "creative" because she is able to use what she knows to come up with a novel solution to the problem at hand. If the solution weren't novel, she would simply have used a previously created code snippet to perform the function, and moved on. Or consider the medical researcher, who is trying to come up with a new treatment that will be both effective and safe for some specific medical condition. Again, if the goal is to solve a problem, the person solving the problem is engaged in the creative process.

So, if the Creative is an artist trying to break out of a bout of doldrums, where the creative vibe simply isn't happening, that's a problem. And, like all such problems, it can be solved. Perhaps not easily or quickly, but the solution is there waiting.