5 Facts you Didn’t Know About Creativity

Fact number 3 – Creativity can be improved and trained

All right, now you know that we are all creative in varying degrees and you can be more creative than others in some specific domain. Next step – how can a person improve at it?

There are some factors which can affect the process of development, such as motivation (if you don’t want something – it will not happen, I hope it’s clear), positive mood (creativity is rarely positively pushed by time-pressure and stress), psychological safety, curiosity, supportive social environment, multicultural experience (people who are aware about cultural differences tend to be more creative) (Hennessey & Amabile, 2009). An interesting point to note is that people who believed that they are creative showed better results in a creativity than those ones, who didn’t! It boosts the concept that people’s beliefs about their creativity are also connected to their self-reports (Silvia, Wigert, Reiter-Palmon & Kaufman, 2012).

What to say? Believe in yourself – it has a measurable effect! 

Fact number 4 – Sorry, you know too much for being creative…

Sounds provocative, right?
However, Kim (2011) observed that a certain level of knowledge can decrease creativity. If you know too much about particular field it might be more difficult for you to see the field in a radically different light and come up with a completely new idea.

Fact number 5 – Theory of creative contribution

As I mentioned earlier, there is no need to invent something completely new to contribute in a creative way. There are two ways to make a creative contribution: developing an existing paradigm and replacing an existing one. In the case of the former, an existing feature is replicated or redefined (as for example, when directors are reshooting a movie from 90s in a modern way). It always involves looking back at the past and then trying to reconceptualize something old with the infusion of new ideas. In the replacement process, conversely, we look only into the future, trying to move a field to a new starting point, or else synthesizing two distinct domains which were not previously supposed to be merged so as to create a new idea (Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009).

Okay, so now you can ask during the job interview what exactly they want from you when a job description talks about “being creative” 🙂

In all seriousness, creativity is such a fragile and vibrant topic, because it is difficult to measure, can be affected by so many factors and has its own rhythm and sequences. But one thing is certain: you can always work on your own skills and develop your creativity through active observation, being willing to be surprised, exploring the unknown and being open to the new experiences. Good luck!

Inspired by:

Council of Europe (2014). Education for Change. Change for Education. Teacher Manifesto for the 21st century. Strasbourg: Council of Europe.

Guilford, J. (1950). Creativity. American Psychologist, 5, 444–454.

Hennessey, B. & Amabile, T. (2009). Creativity. Annual Review of Psychology, 569-591.

Silvia, P., Wigert, B., Reiter-Palmon, R., & Kaufman, J. (2012). Assessing creativity with self-report scales: A review and empirical evaluation. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 6(1), 19–34.

Kaufman, J., & Beghetto, R. (2009). Beyond big and little: The four c model of creativity. Review of general psychology, 13(1), 1-12.

Kim, K. (2011). The APA 2009 Division 10 debate: Are the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking still relevant in the 21st century? Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5(4), 302-308.