The Element

Creativity
Originally uploaded by sleepwithbutterflies

I am thinking a lot about creativity at the moment.

I am wondering if paid work and creative fulfilment can be compatible – by this, I mean looking for a way in which to bring the “real me” and the “working me” together, and still pay the mortgage and keep the proverbial wolf from the door.
Of course, for this I need to know what the “real me” is – where my natural talents lie, how to connect more fully with the things that drive and inspire me.

I have a strong feeling of being more and more divorced from my core passions (whatever they are!), as I grow older and messy old life gets in the way.

Reading Ken Robinson’s book “The Element”, about finding where talent and passion meet, I’ve found a fair few things to think about.

Robinson makes a few interesting points:

• The Western school system was designed at the time of growing industrialism, and principally works to churn out standardised workers. Therefore, the focus is on a hierarchy of key subjects – maths, sciences etc – to the exclusion and suffocation of creativity and natural talent.
• Academic ability measures only a handful of limited types of intelligence: to illustrate, he relates the story that the IQ test was originally a scale of capability, not intelligence, but was hijacked by the eugenics movement to prove their theories.
• The modern world favours standardised academic achievement but, in the future, as universal education grows, creativity will be more uncommon and more highly prized. Robinson foresees a creative economy arising from harnessing a synergy of human abilities rather than pigeonholing people.
• He defines creativity as “applied imagination”: where imagination is thinking, creativity is doing, so creativity, like literacy, needs nurturing and developing.
• The key, then, is cultivating non-linear thinking, and nurturing connections and analogies: To be fully aware, one must maximise chance opportunities, listen to your intuition and grow creativity through generating ideas and practising whatever is your talent, continuously evaluating and developing to improve.

Lots of lessons here for life, but how to apply them? My intelligences, I think, are around linguistic and interpersonal capabilities, but what to do? More thinking required, and I fear I‘m a little out of practice …

Watch Ken Robinson’s TED Talk for a neat summary of his ideas.

[http://www.thisbutterflymind.blogspot.com/]