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What does it mean to be creative? What is creativity? How can we express our creativity in how we learn and communicate? How can we be more creative? These are four questions I’ve been pondering on a variety of levels over the past few weeks because I’ve seen, heard, and felt a variety of messages about creativity: “use this time to be creative,” “the word creative revolts me,” “it’s okay if you don’t feel creative right now.” On top of it all, a lot of people claim to not be creative, even people whose very business is creativity in one form or another. In this episode of Getting Work To Work, I’m going to explore creativity as the end result of how I think, what I make, and who I am.

A few ways to define creativity:

• Creating something out of nothing.
• Translating images you see in your mind into being through drawing, illustration, collage, filmmaking, photography, design.
• Collecting bits and pieces of stuff you discover like a junk store junkie and sharing them as is.
• Discovering a format and style, endlessly producing work in that medium.
• Remixing what is and what could be in whatever form you work in.
• The way you solve a problem, the way you state what the problem is, the solutions available to you.
• Your process of self-education and learning the next step to keep you moving forward.

What creativity is for me:

Creativity is the endless search for bits and pieces, ideas, fragments; putting two or more of those fragments together and seeing what the result is. From there, it forms a web of secondary and tertiary ideas.

I could take my two ideas and create twenty through iterative functionality. Take an idea, run it through a set of steps, then take the result and run it through the function again and again and again. The only limit is time and energy.

The fun thing about iterative functionality is that creativity is multi-functional. It affects the process, but is also the end result of a process that is fed back into the cycle.

Show Links

• Carlos Santana and Armin van Buuren on MasterClass
• Armin van Buuren
• Photo by Dogacan Ege Altunsu on Unsplash
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