So, you think you’re not creative?
My whole life I believed that there were creative people, and there were not-creative people, and that I was one of the unlucky ones.
I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t dance, I couldn’t paint, draw or do pottery. I was that person in art class who tried their hardest to stick to the ‘photorealistic’ brief provided by the teacher but ended up with a canvas that looked closer to impressionist, surrealist, or abstract.
In art class I got a participation ribbon…if I was lucky.
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By contrast, my best friend Ebony was a prodigy. At age eight she’d pick up a pencil and effortlessly start doodling lines on the page until they started to take shape. Individual strokes, at first random and chaotic, slowly formed into something beautiful. A woman’s profile. A bird perched on a tree. A haunting landscape. To this day I’ve never met anyone who could sketch as well as her.
Not only at school, I was surrounded creative geniuses at home too.
My sister Briony and I both played instruments from a really young age; I picked the violin, she picked the cello, and we both tried our hand at piano. Day in day out, we’d attend lessons, practise and perform in the local community orchestra. Briony flourished; she taught herself the guitar, learnt to sing, started a jazz band, and eventually recorded an EP. Meanwhile, the violin and I screeched along, the vibration of my strings sounding closer to a strangled cat the more hours I put into practise. Whatever promise I’d shown when I started out at age six quickyl dwindled, and it soon became pretty clear that I’d plateaued just a few years in. Unlike my sister, I didn’t compose songs, win awards, or get standing ovations.
I still have my old orchestra’s participation certificate tucked away somewhere in a drawer.
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But recently, I started questioning this idea that just because I can’t sing, act, dance or draw, I missed out on the creative gene. I’ve realised that creativity is more than putting on an art show or performing a concert. It’s how I intentionally pick out flowers on a Saturday morning and arrange them in vases around the apartment. It’s the way I carefully choose words and place them on a page, then reorder, reorganise and restructure them.
The truth is that creativity is within all of us.
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that our personal expression of creativity — whether it be singing, dancing, drawing, crunching numbers, developing strategies, podcasting, designing or writing — is the thing we have to offer the world. It’s what makes us unique, one of a kind, unlike any other. No one can draw lines on a page like Ebony, and no one can compose a melody like my sister Bri. I’ll bet no one has written an article, word for word, exactly like this either (although the ideas embedded certainly aren’t original, but that’s a musing for another time).
Like me, if you’ve grown up thinking you’re one of the unlucky non-creative ones, then you need a major wake up call. Here it is: we’re all born creative, yes, even you my friend. It’s part of what makes us real-life non-AI human beings.
You have a special skill, talent or creative gift lurking deep inside. If there’s anything I know for sure, it’s that there’s something on this planet that only you can create. Something only you can craft in your special, specific, you-like way.
For more musings on business, psychology, philosophy and personal development, follow me on Instagram @annaclmack.
