Creativity false myths

Published on May 5th, 2017

Premise

Debunking false myths is an interesting activity but not easy at all.

We are surrounded by false convictions and so much addicted to them.

Creativity is for geniuses

One of these false convictions is that the creativity is for geniuses. A special talent that few have and which the most characteristic sign is the extraordinary. Arts, invention and science are polluted by great minds that do something exceptional. That is it, that's all.

Creativity is for all

Hunting wild fast animals are energy and time consuming activity. Making and displacing traps, less. In a lucky day enough to find more entrapped animals than immediate food necessity, deciding to kept one alive for later. Then breeding the animal and realise that could be mated to have more of them. Making sort of selection to improve their useful characteristics along generations. Using the derivatives to produce utensils and others goods.

A long list of challenges for which each step forward requires a creativity fiat: something that there was not here before.

The value of creativity

If you say Louvre, you means La Gioconda and viceversa. Louvre is not a room. It is an enormous museum fulfil of beautiful and memorable works. Everyone knows about Leonardo's work but few consider that it is a small precious piece of art among millions.

Creativity used for addressing a bit of complexity − everyday, day by day − brought us the world as we know it today. Did we ever thought about it?

Progress is the ultimate effect

Wake up in the early morning and observe the places around you before they became crowded. We will see a lot of small pieces of creativity: small problems addressed.

Nature is the primordial muse

Go outside urban areas and look at the nature, especially in the spring time. Recall all the memories about biology, chemical, fractals, ethology notions. We will see a lot of marvellous ways to address problems and cope with adversities.

Creativity as utility

If the Monna Lisa paint is an example of the creativity value. The screwdriver coupled with a magnet − in such a way, it saves us the annoying burden of loosing the screw or keeping it in place with a hand − is an example of creativity as utility.

We admire the first and we overlook the second? Not really, we patent the second and make it a business. The marketing will tell us that such invention required a lot of effort and we have to pay an added value for it. We take the idea and we generalised it.

Creativity jails

We created big boxes containing small boxes containing educated people that make scientific research in order to find extraordinary tricks to patent... and the reality slap our faces − everyday, day by day − regardless our efforts because our false convictions.

One of these days a scientist studying a very common worms found that they are able to eat a very common kind of plastic and produce, as result, the basic component for car anti-freezing liquid. A complex chemical farm in a small worm. News source npr.org

Discovery has made by accident. How did it happen? She put some worms into a plastic bag and left alone enough they starve enough to eat the bag. When she take again the bag, she found it was deteriorated with holes. Nature was trying to escape that bag.

Is it all the story? She used by chance a plastic bag as container? Nope.

“Por suerte, la naturaleza me ha dotado de una curiosidad irracional hasta para las cosas más nimias. Eso me salva. La curiosidad es lo único que me mantiene a flote. Todo lo demás me hunde. ¡Ah! Y la vocación. No sé si sería capaz de vivir sin ella” −Pedro Almodóvar

Creativity breaks the box

She was frustrated about wax worms infesting her beehives. She was working in a biological laboratory. She decided to use that laboratory for her personal purposes. She pickup some wax worms samples and used a sealed plastic bag made of the same common plastic they are made shopping bag to store them and carry to the laboratory.

She did not behave as a serious traditional scientific researcher. One of them that would call for buying wax worms for scientific purposes from a dealer that will grant the strict quality of every step from the genomes, growth, feeding, packaging, delivering, etc. One of then that would wait for the call would be approved, managed and delivered.

Strictly speaking she made a set of protocol abuses, she broke the rules and she made a discovery that probably will change our future about recycling shopping bags plastic.

Creativity is a curios one

She made it − also − because she stopped. She had a goal: finding a beehive wax worms parasite contrasting agent. She did not carry on straight for her way, pointing at her own goal. She stopped and diverted from her goal. She got curios about the bag degrade. She made specific tests in order to identify the reason behind it.

Breaking rules is not for all

If we − all of us − got the habit to breaks rules constantly, to stop at each anomaly, to divert on every detail that we did not fully understood yet, we will never achieve any goals, missing our deadlines, waste our time. We are used to stay focused for a good reason. We are used to follow rules and procedures for a variety of very good reasons.

Creative people

Our ideas and behaviours are shortcuts for a set of goals. These shortcuts help us to achieve such goals with efficiency, to relief us of the burden of considering every details, every time. We call it, routines. Routines are fast, easy and comfortable.

Routines are boxes and shortcuts are traps. A comfortable living room with a sofa.

“I could never be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.” −Eleanor Roosevelt

Few people are able to identify valuable small anomalies and able to investigate them, properly. Few people are able to break rules creating value. They are not geniuses, not more than those climbed the Himalaya. They are explorers, those that preserved untamed a strong instinct for the adventure. They are borderline pioneers.

A genius is only a way to say that a pioneer achieved something great for all.

Creativity exploitation

We may consider creative people like a natural resource.

Like harvesting wild fruits in the forest. To improve the harvesting we may consider to cut down the forest around them. In order to exacerbate or control their production to put them out of their comfort zone, even preventing pluvial watering or soil nutrition. We may think that exploitation is the best way to deal with natural resources.

We may be incredibly wrong in our beliefs.

“Pienso que si perdemos la curiosidad no hay nada; no hay reflexión y, por tanto, no hay conocimiento y no hay ninguna posibilidad de saber, de llegar al final de algo. Sin curiosidad, directamente no estás vivo.” −Luis Eduardo Aute

UPDATE 01.02.2024

L'ozio creativo, le 7 regole d'oro di Simone Mannori, ENEA.

Link: https://lnkd.in/djJXjrZe

Index of all articles

Project Management, Decision Making, Technology Innovation, Leadership & Creativity, Economia, Cultura, Società e Costume, Progetti, Idee e di divulgazione.

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