If you think about creativity, most people think about the arts. But as we have been discussing, that’s not really the only place we can find it, right?

Take a minute now to think about where we would be without creativity. Just think about it. On the surface, sure, we’d have no movies, no music, no beautiful wall murals, that’s fine. But when we dig deeper, that also means no vaccines, no electric cars, no broken athletic records, no new food dishes, none of it. We wouldn’t even be close to any of those thing if we hadn’t used some sort of creativity.

If there was no creativity, no use of it, no application of it, no growth of it, we would be back with the cave people if we were lucky. The whole human race has, at the very basic level, been built off of experiencing, learning, and applying what you learned. Sometimes on repeat. Sometimes with little success. Sometimes learning the wrong lesson.

This human growth, to get from the caves to the smart watch, requires an element of problem solving, which almost never happens without some sort of creativity. There’s a road block, now how do we solve it? What have I learned so far and can it be applied? Has been applied before? What were the results? It hasn’t? Why/why not, let’s try it! Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t (learn from it), and sometimes it comes to a solution for an entirely different problem we weren’t even looking at.

Yes, the invention of electricity needed math and engineering skills, but the application of those particular skills to this result was new. Creative!

Designing of an operating system to go from a laptop to a phone to a watch requires coding, engineers, and designers. The combination of these skill sets to get to these results, especially if you get there first… Creative!

Using biomimicry to apply a shark-like skin to a bathing suit to make the swimmer go faster needs the study of biology and some interest in fashion. But applying them in this way to get some swim records broken… Creative!

Anything that I have read so far about the COVID vaccine indicates that this is a relatively new way of making a vaccine. CREATIVE!

Shepard Fairey said at MAX that “there is always something that needs to be addressed.” Art is one way to do that, but we need to be creative in our presentation, we need to get the message across. Maybe there’s a better way. “Every movement here to change the world takes creativity” (Common). He’s not just talking about making art for change, Common is talking about how it will take creativity to get to that change. Creative ways of thinking, creative ways of building and breaking down process, and creative ways of doing everything better. Creativity.

“Creativity is a way to express our beliefs and connect with others” (Shantanu Narayen). It is a way to share, learn, and experience something totally new. When we learn from each other, there is opportunity for new ideas to grow from those experiences, which can lead to new areas of understanding or study. Creativity.

Everyone needs even the smallest level of creativity to even create their own identity. For the most part, none of us want to be exactly like someone else. We will all take bits and pieces of interests, or non-interests, and build who we are in our own way. Creativity. I don’t think that Thirty-One thought that I would wear their bag with my Guess jeans and my local brewery sweater. I don’t think that the dyer of my yarn pictured it being used with the pattern I am knitting, because the pattern was published after I brought the yarn home. I don’t know that Hyundai pictured my car with a Time Turner hanging from the mirror, but who knows. A small level of creativity went into each of those decisions that I made, coming up with a new combination that might not have been done before, at least not by me.

We are creative everyday, in the smallest of ways and we need it to grow further individually, as a society, and as the human race. We aren’t going to fix problems without creative thinking (see my comment about the COVID vaccine). We aren’t going to move forward in education without creative thinking. We aren’t going to grow without creative thinking. We need creativity to continue.

Before you claim that you are not creative, take a look at what you have done today, I am sure you’ve had at least one original thought or idea. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Creativity is something we can claim, and something we should all claim, because without it we would be in a very sad, cold place indeed.