Creativity Changed the World
Don’t Panic! It’s OK I’m not going to ask you to change the world or even suggest that you try. However, I do think it is important to highlight how and why Creativity has been the main driver of our progress from a Flint Knife to the moon and beyond.
Don’t worry, I’m not about to give you a history lesson. What I want to do is give you a broader perspective on Creativity in the hope that this will help you to shape your creative efforts to make them more effective, robust and durable.
Human history is full of examples of people looking at the world around them and imagining that something could be different. Sometimes they were trying to solve a problem. Sometimes they were satisfying their curiosity and sometimes, I suspect, they were simply playing around with an idea to see what happened.
Whatever their reason, they created something that wasn’t there before but I am pretty sure almost none of them even considered that their creations would change the world.
It’s Not Always Easy
It’s very easy to take the things around us for granted. I can sit at my computer, type a few words and within seconds somebody thousands of miles away can read them. We don’t find that particularly remarkable anymore. In fact, we’re more likely to complain when it takes three seconds longer than usual.
Try explaining that capability to somebody living five hundred years ago.
For most of human history, virtually everything we now regard as ordinary would have seemed extraordinary. In fact, there was a time not so long ago when many creatives and original thinkers were persecuted, or derided as mad, delusional, dangerous disrupters, or witches.
Don’t be discouraged if people denigrate your creative efforts. There are a lot of closed-minded bigots out there who are happy to criticise. Just ignore them and let them live unhappily in their own personal stone age. Your creations won’t change their world, but they could change yours.
Creativity is Not Simply About Technology
It would be a mistake, though, to think that creativity is simply the story of inventions and technology. Long before anybody built a computer or flew an aeroplane, human beings were painting pictures, telling stories, making music, decorating objects and finding ways to express what they saw and felt.
Somebody once made the first musical instrument. I wonder what the people around them thought when they first heard it? Perhaps they were impressed. Perhaps they thought the person making strange noises with a hollow bone had finally lost their mind.
We’ll never know, but somebody experimented.
That’s the bit I find interesting. Creativity involves being prepared to try something when you don’t know exactly what the result will be.
The first person to draw an image on a cave wall couldn’t have known that thousands of years later people would still be looking at the work of prehistoric artists. They simply made something.
Will people be admiring your creations in thousands of years’ time? You shouldn’t care. The important thing is the creation here and now.
We Build on What Came Before
There’s another aspect of human creativity that you should bear in mind. Very little of what we create appears completely independently of everything that came before it.
Creations evolve: The motor car is a good example, a hand cart, a carriage, a horseless carriage, an E-type Jaguar. (had a ride in one once, not very comfortable). Every creator over the years added their contribution and you should not be worried about doing the same.
That’s how creativity often works. We inherit an enormous collection of ideas from the people who came before us and then add something of our own.
You don’t have to start with a blank universe.
Small Ideas Can Have Big Results
Not every important creation looks important when it first appears.
Consider the humble printing press. Printing itself existed before Gutenberg, but combining existing ideas and technologies into a practical system for producing books more efficiently helped transform the way knowledge could be distributed.
Before widespread printing, producing a book could require an enormous amount of work. Once books could be reproduced in quantity, ideas could travel much further and faster. More people could encounter them, challenge them, improve them and build upon them.
One creative development helped other people become creators.
I rather like that idea.
Your creation doesn’t necessarily have to do something extraordinary itself. It might give somebody else the information, inspiration or opportunity they need to do something you never imagined.
Creativity Isn’t Always About Solving Problems
We’re often told that successful ideas solve problems, particularly when people start talking about creating products. There’s obviously a great deal of truth in that and if the main focus of your creativity is to make money, it is a good strategy, but don’t fall into the trap of believing that solving a problem is the only worthwhile reason to create something.
What problem did the first song solve?
What problem does a beautiful painting solve? What about a funny story, a photograph of a sunset or a piece of jewellery somebody simply enjoys wearing?
Human beings don’t live by solutions alone.
We create things because they entertain us, move us, amuse us, fascinate us and sometimes simply because making them gives us pleasure. We decorate our surroundings when plain walls would function perfectly well. We make music when silence would be considerably easier. We tell stories about people who never existed. None of that is essential to our survival, yet we have been doing it for thousands of years.
Creativity isn’t simply about making life easier. It’s also part of what makes your and others lives fulfilling, interesting, and pleasanter.
Curiosity Has Taken Us a Long Way
“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice
No you haven’t ended up in Wonderland. Or maybe you have! It all depends on how you look at it.
We humans have an annoying habit of asking questions. What’s over that hill? What happens if I heat this? Why does that fall? Can I make this move? Could I travel there? What would happen if I mixed these two things together?
Have you ever wondered why anybody bothered finding out some of the things we now know?
Imagine looking at the night sky thousands of years ago and deciding that you wanted to understand what those little points of light actually were. There was no guarantee that knowing would put food on the table or make tomorrow any easier. But somebody must have been curious enough to try to find out more.
Quite often the answers don’t lead to anything useful.
Occasionally the answer changes the world.
The problem is that when you start out on that journey of curiosity you don’t know where you will end up. So, keep an open mind, don’t limit your opportunities by deciding to look for what may be life changing, world changing, profitable, or any other outcome. Simply explore and see where it takes you.
Give your curiosity room to wander but, like Alice, this can take you down a lot of rabbit holes. Just accept this as part of the process. One of today’s rabbit holes may become tomorrow’s world changing vision.
Mistakes Have Done Their Bit Too
The history of creativity isn’t a tidy procession of brilliant people having brilliant ideas that work perfectly.
There have been plenty of mistakes. In fact, I would describe the whole process as “A bit messy”. Experiments fail. Designs don’t work. People misunderstand what they’ve discovered. An attempt to make one thing produces something completely different. Sometimes the failure itself becomes useful. At other times it simply tells the creator what not to do next time.
We tend to see the finished result and forget everything that happened before it. We see the successful invention, published novel, beautiful painting or thriving business. We seldom see the discarded versions, abandoned ideas and occasions when the creator probably wondered why they ever started.
That’s worth remembering when your own creation isn’t behaving itself. You aren’t necessarily doing anything wrong. You are simply, like it or not, blundering through the creation process.
You Don’t Need to Be a Leonardo da Vinci
When we talk about creativity changing the world, there’s a danger that we make creativity seem even more remote from ordinary life. We start thinking about Leonardo da Vinci, great inventors, famous writers and people whose names appear in history books. Then we look at our own little idea, and it seems rather pathetic by comparison.
Don’t do that to yourself.
Most creativity happens without anybody writing about it afterwards. People improve the way they work, make things for their families, devise better methods, write stories that a few people enjoy, invent games, create websites, develop recipes and find solutions to everyday problems.
Their names don’t appear in history books, but they have still changed a small part of the world that existed around them.
That’s achievement enough, they have made a difference.
Now it’s Your Turn
The wonderful thing about living now is that we have inherited an astonishing collection of human creativity.
Today you have access to tools that previous generations couldn’t have imagined. You can learn about almost any subject, communicate with people around the world, publish your writing, share photographs, create videos, design graphics, make music and build things without needing any special skills or knowledge.
More importantly, you have access to thousands of years of other people’s ideas. You can borrow from them, combine them, adapt them, improve them and take them somewhere else. That’s not cheating. It’s what human beings have always done.
Creativity didn’t bring us from stone tools to the Moon because a handful of special people possessed some mysterious gift. It happened because generation after generation imagined possibilities, experimented with them and passed what they learned to those who followed.
Most of us aren’t going to change the whole world, and that’s probably just as well. Imagine the chaos if world changing happened every day! Anyway, we don’t need to set the bar that high. You have your own little corner of the world. Have a go and see what you could change there?