Creativity and What It Isn’t

Just all of our collective garbage, going up in flames. The climate, the racism, the politics, the pandemic. I don’t have to tell you this stuff.

So I won’t.

But I do want to talk about something else that’s accompanying all of this crazy: A massive, worldwide increase in creativity.

I’m what you’d call a professional creative. It’s literally in my job title. So I feel like I can say this with a fair amount of credibility: We are using the word “creative” wrong. Because of my job title, I have a fair number of opportunities to discuss the idea of creativity with people, both within and without my line of work. “Ohmygod, I’m so not creative,” people tell me with alarming regularity. Let’s come to an agreement right now: Creativity is a human trait. All children have it. All adults have it. This is not arguable. This is fact.

You may or may not be in the habit of using creativity, but you’re more than capable of it. It’s not the same as having artistic talent or being good at making things, it’s simply refusing to let habits govern your thinking, your actions and, most of all, your problem-solving. And what did this pandemic grant our entire world, all at once? Problems. Or, rather, our awareness of them. It’s optometrically significant that year 2020 would improve our collective vision, bringing focus to some of the things we’ve been keeping shoved to the back of a metaphorical closet.

But with problems comes invention, ingenuity, solutions. In a word, creativity. Had any epiphanies, realizations or revelations lately? So have a lot of other people. It’s funny what we notice when we slow down. What we learn when we start paying attention. And what we can change when we start trying.

You’ve witnessed creativity lately—Maybe you’ve found new uses for Zoom or a new and desperately needed arrangement for your home life. Maybe you’ve switched up your locale because, hey, suddenly we’re not so attached to a certain point on the map. Maybe you’ve gotten creative with finding work or socially distanced social activities. We’ve witnessed leadership at every level get creative in a whole variety of ways, for better or for worse. The digital world is daily reinventing itself and its possibility–. Writers are more poignant than they’ve ever been. Nonprofits are inventing new ways to fundraise. People are inventing new ways to be together and to not go crazy. We’re inventing new dinner menus. New solutions to climate change. New everything on a tiny and internal and globally massive scale. This is being jolted from our habits. This is being faced with new problems. This is. It’s exploded and it’s gotten all over everybody.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and 2020 is the motherfucker of a year that put creativity where it’s needed and where it belongs: in use everywhere.