Creativity is not an art.

By tanner Christensen Aug.31,201

It seems as though any time you talk about creativity with somone who doesn’t consider themselves to
be very creative, the conversation typically revolves around art.

Drawing, writing, sculpture, photography, music, dance, you name it. But art isn’t creativity, and the
reverse is also true.

Actually, creativity is the mental capacity to generate novel and useful ideas, more or less. It isn’t about
art or design, writing or music. Creativity is, at its core, about ideas and how we develop, understand,
and communicate them. Not just in terms of the arts, but in every realm of thinking and work.

Of course, some art requires creative thinking, the ability to see what nobody else can see, to create
what nobody else has created. But art itself is not creativity incarnate.

Why do people tend to talk about the two as though they were inexplicably connected then?

I believe we often talk about art whenever the topic of creativity comes up because it’s easier to believe
that everything outside of the world of art has concrete rules which we cannot break. Whereas art, with
its freedom to interpretation, only has loose rules which are broken often and freely in order to create
higher c7aliber—or questionable—art.

Mathematics, nutrition, and physics, are a lot more restrictive in how we interpret and work with them.
There isn’t a lot of room for rule-breaking in the realm of STEM (science, technology, engineering and
math).
But, of course, that isn’t true either. Most problems are not like math problems. Still, there are plenty of
opportunities in the world of STEM to think creatively. Elon Musk and his company SpaceX are pushing
the known boundaries of engineering by creating rockets that can go into space and then come back to
Earth and land, upright, on a autonomous drone in the middle of the ocean. In mathematics creative
strides have been made throughout history: calculus, binary logic, and matrix algebra, to name a few
creative breakthroughs.

Not only that, but math has been used as a fundamental creative device for propelling innovation
forward over the last century.

If we look at creativity as being about expression, or about solely existing in the freeform world of art,
we diminish its power. Unsurprisingly, by doing so we also give ourselves an excuse: I could never be
creative, we tell ourselves, because I only work around logic, reasoning, and science.

The reality is creativity exists in many different forms across many different areas of work, thinking, and
problem-solving.

It’s worth repeating: creativity is about ideas and how we develop, understand, and communicate them.
Not just in terms of the arts, but in every realm of thinking and work.

If you think you’re creative or not, you’re right. Even if you aren’t an artist, or a scientist.