You’re a Creative Genius
by Karl Plesz
A creativity test developed for NASA, and later administered to children, produced a shocking result. One group of children it tested were around 5 years old. The results of the testing demonstrated that an incredible 98% of those children were classified as ‘creative genius.’ Now that they had a baseline, the testers wanted to see how those same kids would fare 5 years later. Even more surprisingly, only 30% of the 10-year-olds still tested as creative geniuses. When they were 15 years old, only 12% of the same kids remained in the creative genius category. How about adults? Well sadly, only 2% of all the adults ever tested, even outside that particular group, are classified as creative geniuses.
The conclusions that have been drawn from these replicated tests are that our education system slowly converts us from creative divergent thinkers to convergent thinkers, whose primary methods involve judgment, criticism, and censoring. Worse, the young brain is subjected by school culture to using both types of thinking at the same time, which causes a conflict. Ask a child to think creatively, then judge them for every idea they come up with. Reward students for memorizing content and blindly following rules. That just stunts the divergent brain. According to the authors of the study, you can unlearn convergent thinking and re-learn divergent thinking with some effort. But why is this important?
The smartest people in the world say again and again that the key to success is growth. The key to growth is innovation. So, if we want to succeed, we need to innovate. But innovation isn’t just about creating new things, it’s also about getting better and more efficient at what you do now.
The biggest block to creative thinking is the fear of being wrong, of making a mistake. You have to give yourself permission to make mistakes. Every good idea grows in the decaying soil of a hundred bad ones.
Another huge block to creative thinking is trying to figure stuff out on your own. Collaboration is the secret weapon of creative thinkers. Creativity comes from without, not from within. Research the history of any great new idea, no matter what form, and it is likely the product of a collaborative team of creators.
Yet another big block to creative thinking is ego. Once we as individuals give birth to a creative idea, it’s only natural to love it. While believing in your creations is important in the early stages, you have to be able to let them go as needed. You can force an idea to work, and it might make you feel better for a while, but this will cause you more work and grief in the end. We need to learn to be able to set the idea we love aside, and either be willing to wait for the right time to use it, or perhaps kill it altogether.
There are a few skill sets we can learn to help in this evolution. One is play. The right kind of adult play can dismantle barriers to creativity. Play forces collaboration. It exercises our divergent brain. Playing is fun. Another skill that fosters creativity is improvisation. The first lesson improvisors learn is how to fail. Often. Graciously. Improvisors also collaborate. Constantly. They also learn to stop rejecting ideas and simply build on what’s been offered. It may work or it may not. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the journey, the developing story, and that an idea was tried at all. Every idea that manifests may not work with what you’re creating right now, but you’ll always have it in your toolbox to try out on the next thing.
