“Creativity”

Creativity has always been a touchy subject for me. I have never actually felt like I was a “creative person” or anything of that sort. As a child, I could never draw well or create any kind of work of art. My mother, on the other hand, is super “crafty” I would say and always made me do arts and crafts which I rarely enjoyed doing. Maybe it was that I didn’t even really WANT to be creative… this may have led to my downfall. Being creative has always been a tough and daunting task for me that makes me feel stressed and frustrated and I definitely do not like doing things that I know I am bad at.

From the moment I knew what the word creativity meant, I assumed that this is purely a trait that many people are born with and I was just not one of those people. Now that I grow older and am surrounded by more and more diverse people, I am starting to realize that creativity can be learned and practiced just like any other life skill. I do believe that some are born with a creativity gene but there is definitely more to the story and anyone can be creative if they really want to. I never wanted to believe this because learning a new skill, especially creativity, seems like an intimidating skill to learn. Sometimes I would rather just act naïve and say “oh, I will let the creative people do that.”

I will say that there have been times in my life that I actually HAVE felt creative in a more natural way. The most common time that I feel creative is when I am cooking. It is a task I love to tackle. I typically look through a bunch of recipes on Pinterest, find something that looks yummy, take a peek at the recipe, and then create my own version of it. I add and subtract ingredients that I think will make it taste better. During the cooking process, I usually find that the recipe can and should be changed and I do so. Cooking makes me feel like I am actually creating something and more than likely, it turns out great.

Another activity I love to do and that makes me feel creative, is interior decorating. I truly feel like this is something I am good at and the fact that there are levels of creativity needed, makes me even happier. I find that I am best at this task when I am given a few items or furniture pieces for a room and then given the opportunity to use those pieces, create in my mind some sort of theme or feel to the room, then go shopping. When I am putting all the pieces together, I love to move things around and experiment with the space. I will have to admit that I feel the most creative during the actual shopping experience though.

One thing both of these creative activities have in common, is that I have loved to do them ever since I was pretty young. I always wanted to mess up my mom’s clean kitchen and I asked her if I could redecorate my room once a year. At this point, I am thinking that maybe the reason I love doing them so much is because no one ever forced me to do it. Forced creativity will always result in zero creativity coming out of me. There are ways to create a more natural setting for exposing creativity. In Jonah Lehrer’s article How to Be Creative, I thought it was a very interesting point about being more creative when moving to a new city. I found that when I moved from a small suburb to Austin, I felt like I was acting more creative and that I was given the ability to be more creative. It is almost like the feeling of being small and unnoticed, allows for the mind to wander to different and interesting places. Over the past few years, I have definitely felt less creative though. I guess the “big city feel” has worn off.

During my junior year of my undergraduate degree, I accepted an internship in digital marketing. I went into the internship only wanting to focus on the analytical stuff and told my boss that I would let the other intern handle all of the creative tasks because he was the creative one. I think my boss took this as a challenge and she said she was going to help me work on my creativity skill. She would give me an assignment like “come up with a creative Facebook ad for this campaign and do that until it is finished.” I found myself staring at the computer screen for an hour and eventually in tears because I felt unproductive and completely not creative. Of course, at some point I would come up with something but became very nervous and reluctant when I had to present it to my boss. This part of the internship was difficult for me and it made me feel especially not creative but I am glad that I got to practice my creative skill. Oh, and getting paid was a plus too.

The most important part of creating a team is diversity. You have to have team members from all different backgrounds and with different opinions about the world we live in. Another important form of diversity, is having the “creative types” and the other types, whatever you want to call those people like me. The creative types, I think, get the ideas flowing and help others to speak out about their ideas even when they are not feeling outspoken. The others are just as important because they need to pull the brilliant and creative ideas from the creatives and turn them into something great. If both sides can find a medium group, you’re in for some awesome ideas and work. Both sides can help each other with the skill they need to work on too.

As an advertising major (in undergrad), it was especially upsetting for me to feel like I wasn’t creative. It seemed like I was constantly surrounded by the most creative minds possible and this left me always feeling especially useless. In group projects, I felt like everyone in the group was so creative and I felt almost like an outsider, like I was contributing nothing besides some organizational skills. Taking a job in this field really frightened me because I only expected this feeling to get worse. Who wants to feel like they suck at their job? Being forced and paid to be creative, like I explained earlier, can be exhausting and defeating. I agree with the article in Accidental Creative, there are times when humans feel more creative and times when they do not. Punishing someone in the workplace for not coming up with a miraculous idea fast enough, can be a recipe for disaster. The environment has to be healthy. At my internship, every week we would have these sort of brainstorming sessions where a few of us would meet in the “comfy couch room” and just blurt out ideas for upcoming campaigns and write them on the board. I thought this was so fun. It helped me feel creative and also helped me feel more comfortable with my coworkers. Like Lehrer mentions in the article Groupthink, groupthink is a myth and in the workplace, brainstorming in a group can be incredibly important for both coming up with innovative ideas and for creating a strong bond within a team.

Overall, I would like to be more creative and work on practicing my “creative skill.” I definitely want to try the tips for becoming more creative that are given in the article How To Be Creative. I would not only like to feel more confident when it comes to creative tasks but I would also like to be more of a creative asset when it comes to the teams I work with. Maybe my goal for Christmas break can be to “become more creative.” We’ll see how that goes.