Humans are creators. Creating is what we're designed for. Notice how the most miserable retirees are the ones sitting around doing nothing? To live is to create and each person is drawn to create something unique to them. It may be as simple as a meal, or as complicated as a business, a large body of work, or a rocket to the moon; but it is all creation.
Most people writing about creativity focus on when there’s a lack of creativity; to me, a perceived lack of creativity is just a misunderstanding of how it works.
Humans are never lacking creativity. A person may be blind to it, but they are not lacking it.
On the flip side, I have worked with those who suffer from excess creativity. What does that look like? An endless flood of ideas, each one just as alluring and captivating as the one before it. It becomes an endless loop of questioning, "is this idea the one?" As soon as work begins on one idea, another comes to entice attention away. It becomes impossible for a person to focus and stay the course because chasing each new creative inspiration is all consuming.
Self-doubt, overwhelm, and distraction follow in creativity's footprints. The problem is not the endless flow of ideas. The problem stems from the misguided beliefs that: this flow is finite, so each idea must be harnessed, sniffed out, and explored; and it’s possible to predict the success of an idea at its inception.
But creativity cannot be finite, it is the very essence of being human. Look at innovation over just the past 100 years! Because creativity is infinite there is no need to chase everything that comes along. It’s okay to have a wonderful idea and just enjoy the fact that the idea visited you. There is nothing to do. You will have many more ideas visit you, and you can pick and chose which ones to follow. Letting some pass-by will not stop more from coming.
You need ideas for your next book? No problem. You need an idea for where to go for dinner? Check. You need an idea for where to find a new hire? Yep, works for that too. Creativity is happy to respond to whatever is happening in your life if you let it.
Now, will your book be successful? That is not a function of the idea itself. There are many great ideas that were overall failures, like gas powered refrigerators. There are many terrible ideas that were great successes, like the mullet. There are good ideas that took many failures to reach success, like Hershey chocolates.
So what would you do differently if you knew you could never run out of ideas and you didn’t have to wait for the perfect inspiration in order to take action?
Artwork: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci