Fresh Ideas Creativity Is The Ability To Improvise And Adapt To Change; Being Aware Of Our Creativity Makes Our Lives Vibrant
She has written no symphonies. You won’t find volumes of her poetry in bookstores or examples of her art in museums.
Yet everyone who knows Lynne Clos marvels at her creativity.
“I’m not a great artist who has paintings hanging in fancy galleries,” says Clos, who lives in Colorado. “I just do my little projects.”
Those “little projects” range from the truly modest - homemade Christmas cards with a simple, silkscreened tree design - to the wildly ambitious. For six years, she participated in Boulder’s kinetic sculpture race, a lively competition in which entrants build imaginatively decorated, human-powered amphibious vehicles, then race them on land and water while dressed in costumes related to the vehicle’s theme.
Her most recent entry, “The Lizard of Oz,” featured a giant green lizard in an Emerald City motif. The 3,443 scales on its body were made from shimmery wrapping paper, and its teeth were candy corn.
When friends express amazement, Clos is a bit bewildered.
“Most of the time when people say things like that, they are being impressed by something that I’ve done that they don’t think they could have done. I always feel like, ‘Well, sure you could have, it wasn’t that hard,”’ says Clos.
“I’ve never seen myself as a person who has some kind of mysterious inspiration. … It’s not like I get flashes of brilliant insight. I just get fun ideas and think about them.”
In doing that, Clos embodies a new view of creativity emerging from research. Being creative doesn’t necessarily mean being on a par with Picasso or Mozart. It doesn’t even require having artistic aptitude, musical talent or the ability to turn a phrase.
Everyday life offers plenty of opportunities for creativity, and all of us have the potential to be more original.
“Everyone has a lot of creativity, or they wouldn’t be alive,” says Dr. Ruth Richards, a psychiatrist and creativity researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and at Harvard Medical School. “To make it through the day, you have to be able to adapt very flexibly to a lot of things - what your boss is saying, the roadblock on the way to work, your child’s unexpected illness. You don’t have to be painting a picture in a class; you’re constantly improvising.”
That’s really all creativity is - the ability to improvise and adapt to change. And that’s something we all need.
What sets unusually creative people apart?
For one thing, they have a knack for looking beyond the obvious - seeing new uses for things, new ways of doing things, connections between things that seem, on the surface, to be unrelated.
In one study, Harvard psychology professor Dr. Ellen Langer and a colleague showed students everyday objects, such as a hair dryer and a dog’s rubber chew toy. One group was shown the objects and told, “This is a hair dryer”; “This is a dog’s chew toy.” But the other group heard slightly different statements -“This could be a hair dryer” and “This could be a dog’s chew toy” - implying they might be used in other ways.
After all the objects were shown, the students were asked to fill out forms. But the researchers deliberately made mistakes in explaining how. Then they announced the study couldn’t continue because the forms were filled out incorrectly, and they had no extra forms or erasers.
Did anyone think to use the rubber toy as an eraser? Only students in the group that had been told it “could be” a dog’s toy.
This, says Langer, illustrates how important uncertainty and wide-open possibilities are in fostering creativity.
Many of us spend our lives trying to avoid uncertainty, killing our creativity at its roots. That’s not only unproductive, it’s futile, as life’s uncertainties are inescapable.
“Once one realizes that certainty is a myth, to seek it out no longer makes a whole lot of sense,” says Langer. “The adventure should be seeking the novel in what seems to be familiar.”
Seeking novelty doesn’t have to mean hang-gliding naked. It can be something as simple as noticing the colors of passing cars, combing your hair a different way or eating something for breakfast that you’d normally eat for lunch.
Instead of urging people to be more “creative” - a word that can be intimidating - Langer encourages them to be “mindful.” Mindfulness, she explains, is simply paying attention to what you’re doing and what’s going on around you, instead of mindlessly cruising through life on automatic.
“If you ask people, ‘If you have a choice to be sealed in an unlived life or to be alive, which would you choose?’ I don’t think anyone would choose to be sealed in an unlived life,” says Langer. “But when they’re not creatively engaged in their daily routine, that’s what they are.”
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: STEPS TO A MORE CREATIVE DAILY LIFE: Start small. Pair two pieces of clothing you’ve never worn together, or change one ingredient in your favorite recipe. If you usually write down your ideas, try drawing them. If you usually draw, write. Take risks, and try not to worry so much about getting things right. Change your routine or scenery or try a new hobby or sport. Lighten up - play, have a sense of humor, find ways to enjoy yourself while doing even the most mundane things. Exercise. It loosens up the imagination. Fire your censor. Avoid the impulse to reject new ideas before you try them. In problem-solving, believe there is a solution and that you can find it. Practice “sleight of head.” Let your subconscious mind work by thinking of something other than the problem at hand. Don’t stop when you find one solution; look for more. Think of yourself as creative.