Kickstarter and a free chapter!

The Creative Condition book is written and edited, and the Kickstarter campaign is live. I've been overwhelmed by the support so far, hitting 1/3 of my target in 2 days. This book has been a labour of love, a decade's worth of work, talking to all kinds of people about human creativity, and pushing myself to the limits of my tiny mind to write a resource that will outlive me, a way for people to gain a better understanding of what creativity is, how it works, and what theirs looks like.

Please do consider backing the campaign to get the book made - I've gone indie this time out because my onward work for the cause of creativity will be better served by that model - and here is an exclusive first chapter from the book to whet the appetite.

Back the campaign here!

If you prefer to listen, help yourself via the Creative Condition Podcast.

Part 1: Bigger than art?

Chapter 1: What is creativity?

It would be very arty of me to launch into a book about creativity without confronting the monster question: What is creativity?

It starts with human consciousness – a result of a three-way collision of self-awareness, curiosity, and our innate need to impose order on the world around us.

I adored psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s summation of consciousness in his 1990 book, Flow:

The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body. In this sense, it functions as a clearinghouse for sensations, perceptions, feelings, and ideas, establishing priorities among all the diverse information. Without consciousness we would still “know” what is going on, but we would have to react to it in a reflexive, instinctive way. With consciousness, we can deliberately weigh what the senses tell us, and respond accordingly. And we can also invent information that did not exist before: it is because we have consciousness that we can daydream, make up lies, and write beautiful poems and scientific theories.

In his 1996 book Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Csikszentmihalyi describes creativity as: ‘… an idea or action that is new or valuable.’

In his iconic TED talk, ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ late author Sir Ken Robinson defined?creativity as: ‘The process of having original ideas that have value.’?

And, in his mind-bending book, Out of Our Minds: The Power of Being Creative, Sir Ken uses the beautifully distilled description, ‘applied imagination’.

When I began observing creativity consciously, somewhere around the age of 17, I enjoyed trying to spot everyone’s variation of it. Too many people doubted their own creativity?and would go to great lengths to deny they had any capacity for it for reasons we’ll come onto shortly. I was an art student, and I drew, so everyone said that I was creative. And I was (ironically not via my drawing back then, but through humour and storytelling in my day-to-day life). But so were the people telling me that I was. But they wouldn’t have it. ‘Not like you, though!’ was the common response.

It didn’t take me long to recognise the importance of separating creativity from artistry to see creativity’s key and varied roles in all our lives.

Back then, spending my days surrounded by all kinds of ‘creatives’, I bought into the idea of some people being ‘more creative’ than others. That now seems like a misleading and distorted way to look at things.

Once you chase the artistry bit away it’s easy enough to see that people are predisposed to certain types of creativity, then affected by their nurturing environments. We are born with certain measurable abilities – athleticism, good memory, or artistic talent – but it is counter-productive to view something as complex as creativity in the same way.

Artistry relates more to form, and making, usually involving a talent or taste. Whether a thing, or person is artistic is at least in-part, a subjective consideration. My mother-in-law can be artistic in her summer flower arrangements, yet she would argue against this assessment. Neither of us would be right nor wrong. ?

Creativity is a human pre-set.

Legendary record producer Rick Rubin beautifully captures this idea in his book, The Creative Act: a Way of Being: ‘Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression. You are a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.’

Artistry and creativity are intertwined in a famed relationship, and art is indeed one of the most treasured and rightly celebrated trophies in the human cabinet, but I’ve come to consider this lazy, default pairing a catastrophic mistake, and an unnecessary roadblock for people who – despite a lack of artistry – might otherwise better engage with their creativity to greater life fulfilment.

Ideas and making or changing are the foundational components of creativity but making – while still a natural human activity – is a gift shared by countless other species. Making in isolation, without ideas or the ability to visualise the final product’s onward life cycle, is merely an action or process.

Imagination in isolation only serves to alter the mood or mindset of the person doing the imagining. We could theoretically revolutionise all of existence in complex thought and visions – and believe me, I’ve started revolutions in my head. Haven’t we all? An unexpressed idea, no matter how complex or simple its form, cannot live anywhere but in thought, without the chance to begin – as designer and artist Graham Wood beautifully described to me –?its ‘constant state of becoming’.

An action, a medium, and a social and cultural context are required for an imagining to amount to creativity. There are countless forms these actions can assume: verbal, physical, mathematical, symbolic, written, to name a few. This could take place on a computer, in a dance, a rap, a laboratory, a sporting manoeuvre, at a meal table, or a calculation. But thanks to the artistic misconception, people don’t see the creativity in their day-to-day lives for what it is – a life-defining gift.

For the last decade of his career, my dad worked in a hospital. His role evolved from porter into something far more varied, that defied any description. He is extremely personable and went to great lengths beyond the call of duty to help the patients he encountered every day. I took great joy from his stories about settling distressed, often elderly, patients through means of distraction, conversation, humour, and simple acts of kindness such as making tea and toast for them – something for which he was featured in the local newspaper.

Of course, as a Yorkshireman born in the mid-1950s, my dad would never admit to creativity within, but I can assure you these actions would not have been possible without his creativity. What he did was not easy in an underfunded, struggling UK health system where these patients had to spend time in corridors on makeshift beds. In particular, it called on another foundation of creativity: innovation, as he made the best of what he had to work with.

In every waking hour of our lives, humans consume the world around us consciously and subconsciously via the senses, internally process this information, and – through our individualised filters – form and express ideas through actions. It is at that point of expression that we ‘create’.

We are creative.

There is no subjectivity here. No argument to be had.

Creativity is humanity’s very cornerstone, a chief reason for our survival in hard times – making clothes, building and adapting shelter, avoiding a grizzly death at the hands of predators, and staying ahead of deadly viruses all required it.

I’m a very social person and I’ve benefitted from an extremely varied abundance of friendships and acquaintances. The ones who lack any belief that they are creative are often just as, and sometimes more creative than the artists or designers in my life. But the artistic myth is so embedded in social conscience that shifting this perception of creativity is a mighty challenge.

We can all be practical, and we can all be creative, but to what degree is determined by our individual nature and nurture. Yet we continue to attribute creativity, the more glamorous and glorified of the two, to those who wow us with artistry.

Even if we tried not to create in our lives, we would fail. Or die. Or suffer in some way because the physical world in which we live is constantly changing. We must always adapt, and we cannot do that without creativity.

Just watch children. They are funny, playful, inventive, responsive, and dynamic. They soak up their environment constantly to learn and to keep growing. They do not place barriers between the things in their world that interest, amuse, and excite them, or box ideas into rigid categories like adults tend to. I’ll discuss Leonardo Da Vinci later in this book but suffice to say he was one of the greatest polymaths of all time, who recognised the need to maintain this childlike curiosity and fearlessness to traverse far and wide across fields and schools of thought as he studied the world around him. Sadly, the structure of our societies, education systems, and economies render him an extreme outlier and it’s hard to overstate how tragic this is.

The following excerpt is from Sensitive: The Power of a Thoughtful Mind in an Overwhelming World, by Jenn Granneman and Andre Sólo. I found it particularly pertinent to the importance of regarding creativity completely separate from the arts:

Wired to make connections between vastly different concepts, the sensitive mind can blend frames of reference without ever leaving home. Sensitive people are perhaps the ultimate polymaths, thinking not in terms of science, or poetry, or lived experience, or hopes and dreams, but in terms of the themes that run across them all. Many sensitive people speak this way too, readily offering metaphors and linking different topics to make a point… This creativity doesn’t operate alone. It is built on the next three gifts of sensitivity – sensory intelligence, depth of processing, and depth of emotion – which together, add up to a creative mind.

We do not grow out of these childhood instincts to explore as we reach adulthood, but it gets so much harder to act upon them. Stifling something so fundamental to what we are, which capitalism makes it easy for us to do, causes creative inertia or – worse – deep unhappiness.

Rod Tweedy writing in Red Pepper, uses political theorist Karl Marx as a great example of this:

…for me the key concern of Marx, and one that is constantly neglected, or misunderstood, is his view on the centrality and importance of human creativity and productivity – man’s ‘colossal productive power’ as he calls it…

Marx refers to this extraordinary world-transformative energy and agency as our ‘active species-life’, our ‘species-being’ – our ‘physical and spiritual energies’. But these immense creative energies and transformative capacities are, he notes, under the present system, immediately taken from us and converted into something alien, objective, enslaving, fetishised.

Capitalism is not conducive to creativity on a broad scale. We have to hustle and scratch and claw to make a living in increasingly unstable economies and, when all is said and done each day, each week, we are left in a drained state, dozing off in front of the TV in the evenings, kicking that project or idea or desire down the road to the gradual detriment of the soul.

But external factors are ever-present in life; in any system or environment. They shape our decision-making, our confidence, and our ability to follow the heart and it’s a constant battle to find our way. But this isn’t something we should waste time complaining about.

The responsibility to fight for the conditions to be creative on our own terms is ours alone. It’s a strange thought that we have to be creative to create the time to be creative. We can’t just bemoan our misfortune and give up. Even if we had our perfect vision of creative bliss realised, would it really be everything? In a utopia, without cause and grievance – I don’t believe creativity would flourish the way it does with a balance of adversity and beneficial circumstances. I think we’d become bored quite quickly.

But let’s not get too deep too early.

To return to my point, understanding creativity in humans, seeing what it is, was, and can be is an astoundingly big void in social conscience. It’s really quite simple. Dicey jokes, ridiculous suggestions, problems solved in unexpected ways, anecdotes, doodles, written lines, a child’s moving of an action figure from one place to another according to an imagined narrative, a nod in the direction of another person and a knowing raise of the eyebrows to communicate an idea to a friend, a tactic to divert a child from a risky situation – all potential acts of creativity.

I have always encouraged and teased creativity out of people, because – whether knowingly or unknowingly –when they create, they are illuminated. Those who experience the creativity of another get to bask in their glow. This could be a Hollywood movie, or a child feeling the vibrant energy of a grandparent helping them solve a puzzle.

Creativity is the inevitability of our self-awareness. The very thing that makes us unique in the animal kingdom. Without creativity, we’d just be slightly sexier chimps.?

Creativity gives colour to the human path through life. Without it, we’d just spend our lives solving the next problem and, as self-aware creatures, we require more than this in order to be happy and fulfilled.

Without creativity, our quality of life fades and looks like a book left out in the sun too long. The entwining of artistry and creativity has contributed to the often-marginalised role of creativity in education and social systems. If it were prioritised as it ought to be, surely more of us would think independently and question the world around us with persistence and intensity, seeking to innovate and improve it, calling upon our imaginations. Instead, we judge what little we understand of ourselves with exams, salaries, the opinions of others, and social media popularity, and await sentencing according to the demands of the economy and expectations of others long before we’ve had chance to access our creativity and learn how to make better decisions for fulfilment on our own terms.

The Creative Condition is out March 2024. You can back the book on Kickstarter here, and dive into over 200 episodes of conversations around creativity on the podcast.