Creativity is one of those words that most people feel comfortable using, but when asked to give a definition they have trouble putting it into words. I know this because I’ve asked people to do just that, and I almost always see that it causes them to pause before giving an answer that they aren’t always confident of.
Most people will come up with something that involves some idea of originality or uniqueness. Indeed, if you look in the dictionary, that is one of the definitions. But you will also see a definition that points to it being originative or productive. That is, if you make something that didn’t previously exist, you are being creative. It need not be true that nothing like it has ever existed.
The reason that I think this is important to point out is that the idea that only originality matters is something that holds many people back from expressing their creativity. Before they can even start, they judge their idea against other works and find that it is so similar to something else that existed before that it couldn’t possibly be creative. I know that this is inhibiting some great things from entering the world. What a shame.
Consider what would happen if I asked you to make an exact copy of…anything. The odds are that you could get close, but that their would be subtle or not-so-subtle differences. No matter how hard you tried, your work would be different from the thing you were copying. It would be different because it was created by you, and you’re different from whomever or whatever created the original. It’s impossible not to make your mark on it.
On the other hand, if I asked you to come up with something that was nothing like anything that has ever existed before, you’d have an even harder time. Because of the way our brains work, it’s almost impossible to think of something that isn’t based on something already in our mind. Everything that we’ve ever perceived would affect what we could imagine. It’s pretty much impossible to create something that is absolutely unique.
So back to creativity, it must exist between the extremes of being absolutely unique and being exactly like anything that came before it. Everything we make will be based on things that came before it, while at the same time influenced by the unique traits of us as the creator.
Since this in-between condition is inevitably true for anything we could ever make, try to think of creativity without adding this extra criteria of uniqueness. Accept that your creations will be somewhere in between, and focus on the part where you’re making something that didn’t already exist. Don’t let the worry of being unoriginal hold you back!
Now go out and be creative!
