by: Idris Mootee
My first blog post last year was “Your New Year Resolution-Unlock Your Creative Mind”, so I decided to start this year with another post on the “creative” mind. There are lots of myths around what is the "creative class" and how they are often associated with jobs linked to design which is absolutely not the case. You can be very creative but never trained in any design discipline.
My personal experience is that probably the percentage of design school gradates whom I consider creative is not much higher than other non-design graduates. Yeah unless you compare that to B-schools which I think 2 out of 10 versus 3 or 4 out of 10 in design school. And probably 1 out of 10 in accounting school, but that one is dangerous. I have met a lot of fashion designers, visual designers and creative directors that I hardly consider creative at all.
Creativity people are important assets of organizations and societies, the main reason is creativity people provides a good breeding ground for innovative ideas and entrepreneurship and they stimulate the encounter of people with different backgrounds and the combination of their knowledge. This mesh-up knowledge may then constitute an important source of innovation and the formation of new firms, which are important drivers of economic development. That’s why creativity goes hand-in-hand hand with start-ups. For economic growth, starts with attracting the creative people to a city.
Here are the few paradoxes (or yin and yang) of the “creative” mind:
- Creative people tend to be smart and naive at the same time. One way of expressing this dialectic is the opposite poles of wisdom and childishness. Think Mozart, is that ignorance and naive that often comes with creativity. Intuitively creative people know that they have a purpose, a destiny or they realize that they can choose or create one to drive them to reach greater heights of skill, ability, or talent. And they can be a little naive sometimes. They need smart people that they trust and are close to them for constant reminder.
- Creative people have no problem comfortably combining fun with professionalism, or playfulness with discipline. They often make work fun and at are workaholic at time when it comes to applying their creative energy to solve a specific problem. Laughter and creativity truly go together. I personally believe that creativity can’t occur without a lot of humor believing that seriousness tends to squelch creativeness or creative thinking. Creative people tell the best jokes, don’t we?
- Creative people can use their ‘unconscious skills’ and at the same time see all the “pieces” available in front of them. Dealing with both is part of their process to unlock one’s inner genius by reawakening dormant parts of the brain. Creative people thrive on multiple ways of perceiving: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, and sensing things. These different perspectives open up their minds to unlimited possibilities while bringing their imagination back to the present.
And the size and number of tattoos have no indication on the creativity of an individual. Here”s a quote from Theodore Adorno, “A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.”
Original Post: http://mootee.typepad.com/innovation_playground/2009/01/the-yin-and-yan-of-the-creative-mind.html
