What is Creativity?

I will be taking part in a project on “Inspiration” this week and one of the questions I need to answer is the classic: What is Creativity?

Part of my process is to think on paper so here is what I’m thinking.

Creativity is the creation of something that wasn’t there before.

The Eiffel Tower didn’t exist. Then it did.

The Mac didn’t exist. Then it did.

The electric guitar didn’t exist. Then it did. Then everything changed.

The Fosbury Flop. The ETF. The 808 drum machine. Pepcid. The guy who put cheese on the Filet o’ Fish.

Before: nothing. After: something.

Something amazing.

Creativity is thinking around and through constraints. Not despite them. Through them.

The Wright brothers had a little thing called gravity.

That eventually lead to Apollo 13. One working engine, no direct route home, and three astronauts who needed to breathe. The engineers at NASA had to figure out how to fit a square CO2 filter into a round hole using only what was on the spacecraft. Duct tape. Plastic bags. A sock. They used creativity to solve it.

Back on earth, the Beatles. Guitar, bass, piano, drums. Three minutes and the truth. 300+ songs and nearly all of them bangers.

Martha Graham had a constraint too. It was called classical dance. She ignored it. Then she broke it. Then she invented an entirely new language for how the human body could move.

Constraints don’t stop creativity. Constraints inspire creativity.

Creativity is 1+1=3. Or better: 1+1=fish.

Take two things that have no business being together. Combine them. Get something entirely new.

Film Noir plus science fiction equals Blade Runner. Music plus television equals MTV. Mob drama plus family therapy equals The Sopranos. Blues plus electricity equals rock and roll. Fish plus knife skills equals sushi.

The combinations seem obvious in hindsight. They never are in the moment.

Creativity is breaking what’s expected.

David Bowie. Need I say more?

Keith Haring turned the New York City subway system into an art gallery.

Coco Chanel looked at how women were expected to dress and said: no. The corset went. The suit and all possibilities in black and white came in.

Mel Brooks showed that a Western could be a comedy. And so could a horror, Hitchcock and Sci-Fi.

The VW Beetle? Don’t sell it as a peach. Sell it as a lemon.

The Flea-Flicker: You think it’s a run, but it’s a pass.

Creativity is taking what’s expected and making something unforgettable.

Creativity is vision.

Coppola with The Godfather. T.S. Eliot with Prufrock. Cheever with The Swimmer.

Toni Morrison saw the interior lives that American literature had spent a century looking away from. Then she put them on the page and won the Nobel Prize.

Steve Jobs with the entire Apple portfolio.

Zaha Hadid with every building she ever designed.

Creativity is seeing what isn’t there yet.

So here’s my working definition.

Creativity is seeing possibility where others see limits. It’s taking what exists and making something that didn’t.

A new product. A new song. A new company. A new sentence.

Something surprising.

Something useful.

Something true.

Something that makes the rest of us stop and wonder how the hell nobody thought of it before.

Your turn.

What’s Creativity to you?