What is Creativity?

Dictionary Definition:
To Create:
To cause into being as something unique that would not naturally evolve or that is not made by ordinary Processes.

Creativity:
The state or quality of being creative.
The process of finding and capturing ideas.
The production of novel/unique works which are of value.

Creativity is an abstract concept and hard to define, but we generally know it when we see it.

Creative individuals know how to think, not what to think.
They think fluently - effortlessly, smoothly where many ideas just flow. Thomas Edison gave himself a personal quota of one minor invention every ten days and one major invention every six months. Bach wrote a cantata every week, even when he was sick and exhausted. Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music in his lifetime (1756-1791). Out of massive quantities of work came quality.
CREATIVES produce. Period!but
Pushing yourself to experiment and not be satisfied with the first solution will indeed help you to become more creative.

The Creative Greeks
Pythagoras, an ancient Greek philosopher
- developed foundations for modern mathematics
- proposed the theory that the earth was round 2,000 years before Columbus demonstrated the concept
- founded a secret religious sect and declared himself the DIVINE leader
- always spoke to his disciples from behind a curtain to create a more god-like effect
Sound like a movie you know of?

The a famous story about creativity
Archimedes - ancient Greek mathematician and engineer invented the method of determining the volume of an irregular shaped object.

Hiero, ruler of Syracuse, was given a new gold crown. He thought that the goldsmith had adulterated the precious metal and asked Archimedes to test the gold crown without damaging it. Archimedes knew gold is heavier than other metals so he decided to weigh the crown and compare that weight with an equal amount of gold. The problem was how do you determine the volume of the crown to know how much gold to compare it with?

He couldn't figure out a way...UNTIL...one day he was stepping into his bath (as he had done many times before) and realized that the level of the water rose and overflowed the tub.

Solution to the problem!
He realized that the volume of water that was displaced was exactly equal to the portion of the body inserted in the water. He could now dip the crown in water and find it's volume. Archemides was so excited that he ran into the street naked yelling...
Eureka, Eureka, which is Greek for I've got it, I've got it!

End of the story...the crown had been adulterated with silver and the goldsmith was executed. Greeks believed that creativity was very rare, sole property of genius like Archemides and not shared by the common man.

How has mankind viewed creativity?
It has been regarded as a god-like attribute for much of history.
The Ancient Egyptians worshiped as a god the designers who created the first pyramids. In the Middle Ages it was believed creative inspiration was the direct intervention of God and individual genius meant nothing.

Galileo
One of the great creative geniuses of all time, was threatened with torture by the Church unless he recanted his ideas about astronomy and the position the earth held in the universe. The Church discouraged any innovation because it feared that creativity would break the traditional order established by the Church and it's origin might be diabolical.

Creativity was then either -
- property of a small group of geniuses touched by a divine spark
- or it was a by product of madness or the devil

Only the last 60-70 years has creativity
- been regarded as a quality possessed by many
- considered to be a highly desirable quality
- realized that it can be developed in individuals

Scholars, researchers tried to measure genius using statistics from several studies. A 1904 study said most geniuses are fathered by men older than 30 and
had mothers younger than 25 and were usually sickly as children. Other studies said geniuses were celibate (Galileo and Newton), were fatherless (Dickens) and motherless (Darwin, Marie Curie).

In the end....data meant nothing. Academics has been used to measure the link between intelligence and genius and discovered intelligence or a high IQ does not necessarily indicate creative genius.

An average IQ (Intelligence Quotient) is approximately 90-110. Marilyn vos Savant is a question and answer columnist in Parade magazine and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the highest ever recorded IQ of 228. While Richard Feynman, a Nobel-prize winning physicist had a 122 IQ and many feel he's the last great American genius. One can have a lower IQ but through passion for a topic, persistence and the curiosity and will to know can make one develop creative solutions and ides and inventions.

J.P Guilford a leading psychologist of the 60's called for a scientific focus on creativity. Through his research, Psychologists reached the conclusion that creativity is not the same as intelligence. An individual can be far more creative than they are intelligent ....... or far more intelligent than they are creative.

Typically , we think reproductively, we look at similar problems and how we solved them in the past and look no further.
Creative individuals think productively. They ask many different questions and look at the situation in many different ways. Productive thinking produces many alternative approaches.

Richard Feynman proposed teaching productive thinking in schools.
It is better to invent your own way or a new way than it is to look up an old solution and apply what you've looked up.
We need to vary our ideas to succeed.

Some interesting stories....
1899 Charles Duell
• director of US Patent Office
suggested that the government close the office because everything that could be invented was already invented.

1938 Chester Carlson invented xerography.
In 1930, he started work with Bell Telephone Laboratories. Later, while working as a patent attorney in a New York electronics firm he was impressed by the inconvenience of obtaining extra copies of documents and drawings.

In 1935, he set out to invent a machine into which one could feed an original, push a button, and get a copy. He worked for three years studying and brainstorming and hired a physicist to assist him.
On October 22, 1938, in a laboratory room which he had rented, the world’s first electrostatic copying-process was developed. This process was later named xerography and it revolutionized document reproduction in offices and factories.
Kodak and IBM scoffed at his idea.
Carbon paper was cheap and plentiful... who would buy an expensive machine?