What is Creativity?

1/5/2025

That is a loaded question, indeed. The Oxford Dictionary defines creativity as the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work. Whereas, writer Dattopant Thengadi from the Indian government’s website CBWE, defined creativity as a characteristic of a person to generate new ideas, alternatives, solutions, and possibilities in a unique and different way.

These were just some of the definitions of creativity. One of the definitions that I like and relate to the most I found on the Quora forum. Creativity is the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas, products, or solutions. It involves combining existing knowledge and experiences in new and unexpected ways to create something original and useful, wrote freelancer Rajan Varghese.

Varghese added that the most creative thing that a human can do is subjective and depends on individual perspective and experiences. Creativity allows individuals to express themselves. Individual creativity can make a positive impact on the world.

How would you define creativity?

BasicArts writer Alex Smith defined creativity as the ability to shepherd something into existence, manage its growth, allow it to become vibrant, and nurture it. Whereas, imagination is the ability to picture something that doesn’t exist. More often than not, if a person says they are not creative, they actually mean, they are not imaginative. They cannot come up with something at random.

The late Sir Ken Robinson described creativity as a process of having an original ideas that have value. Creativity is not random. Creativity is putting imagination to work, and it has produced the most extraordinary results in our human culture.

“The human mind is profoundly and uniquely creative and it all begins with imagination,” wrote Robinson from his book, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative.

During Robinson’s life, he made it his mission to transform education and organizations by a richer conception of human creativity and intelligence.

Robinson wrote, there are misconceptions about creativity. Here are a few:

1. Only special people are creative. This is not true. People have varying levels of creativity in different fields. If you are human, you have the power of being creative; yet you may not have developed that power fully.
2. Creativity is about special things, i.e. the arts. Often people may say that they are not creative, it may mean that they are not artistic or musical. Robinson reported that you can be creative if you are a mathematician, software developer or business leader. Human intelligence is a possible site of original thinking. Rather than, asking are you creative? Ask how are you creative?
3. The third misconception is you are creative or you are not. That is the end of that. Robinson disagreed with this conception. There is a lot you can do to become more creative. I will touch on that in a future blog post.

In Robinson’s TED talk, “How Schools Kill Creativity.” Robinson stated “we are educating people of out of their creative capacities…I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.”

Our current educational system and culture’s impact on our creativity as children and adults is a topic of its own that I’ll delve into in another blog post.

I will end this blog by asking, What makes you creative?

Resources:

Robinson, Ken. Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. 2017. Capstone

Smith, Alex “The crucial difference between imagination and creativity”. Basic Arts website. https://basicarts.org/the-crucial-difference-between-imagination-and-creativity/ retrieved on 1/3/2025.

Thengadi, Dattoapnt, National Board for Workers Education and Development, Government of India. https://dtnbwed.cbwe.gov.in/images/upload/Creativity-and-Innovation_YYB3.pdf (retrieved on 1/3/2025)

Varghese, Rajan, freelancer/poster on the Quora forum https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-definition-of-creativity-What-is-the-most-creative-thing-that-a-human-can-do. Retrieved on 1/3/2025.

“Foundation of Creativity” Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. https://dpi.wi.gov/fine-arts/foundations-creativity retrieved on 1/3/2025.