Tag: Creativity

Where Does Creativity Start & End

Posted on by jabittan
In his creativity manual, The Users Guide to the Creative Mind, Dave Birss writes about what it means to be a creative person.  He talks about misconceptions that we have regarding creative people, and gives us insights into his personality and what being creative means to him. In a quote he writes, “Being creative isn’t an occupation, it’s a preoccupation.” What he means is that creativity can not be turned on or off. For Birss being a creative person is a full time job. He is always being self aware and trying to identify his thoughts to keep track of his creativity.
Creativity is all about cultivating habits that will build new experiences and fulfill desires to be active. As a preoccupation, creativity is constantly about producing in new areas that expand ones thinking.  The difference between an occupation and a preoccupation for creatives, is that creatives don’t end their work day and step away from what they do. Creatives walk away from one creative endeavor strait into another.  In addition being creative means that you can always take something from one situation and apply it to another.  Learning happens continually as you listen to people talk and provide opinions or ideas (in a constructive and non-pushy way) that come from other situations where you have encountered similar problems or obstacles.  At the same time, Birss would argue that creative people constantly find ways to note what they have learned or new perspectives they have gained, so that they can return to those ideas and incorporate them into future activities.

What is Creativity?

Posted on by jabittan
In his book, A Users Guide to the Creative Mind, Dave Birss writes about how to be creative, and he addresses what we consider creative ideas. He uses a quote from the Bible, “There is nothing new under the sun” to help explain his idea of what creativity is. Birss continues and writes, “It’s better to think of a creative idea as a recombination of existing elements,” which strengthens the platform he establishes with his quote from the Bible.
What Birss is saying is that we have popular misconceptions of creativity and creative people. In some ways we believe that creative people are of a different breed, or have different skills and mental abilities than most people.  We imagine brilliant and creative people as having the ability to think of novel ideas to create and design things that have never before been thought of.
Birss is stating that creativity and the creative process is not built upon a foundation of innovative ideas that are new to humanity. Instead, he writes that our minds are not generating anything new, but simply finding new ways of combining ideas.
I enjoy thinking about creativity in this way because it allows me to be creative and not feel pressured into having novel ideas for applying my creativity. His view on creativity is distinctly human since we all have different viewpoints, backgrounds, and interest, and our diversity in these areas can help us be creative by expressing our unique perspectives.