Know Thyself: Are You a Native, Nomad, Savant, Empathic, or Spiritual Creator?

We are all creators, in thought or action, but are not alike. To know your type is to understand why you feel, think, and create the way you do. The understanding of what lies behind your muse or creative purpose can enhance productivity, opportunity, and success.

My research-based typology groups creators into five categories. Each type represents a common creative purpose that originates in a collective consciousness, a place of shared experiences and recurring perspectives and archetypes, as perhaps Carl Jung would have described it. You can read more in my book. Here is a summary:

1) Native Creator: We are all born native and begin to create from the source we have known most intimately and for the longest. In a postscript to the third edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn asked, “What do members of a group share that accounts for the relative unanimity of their judgments?” Kuhn provided three explanations: symbolic generalizations, commitments to beliefs and values, and knowledge embedded in common exemplars. This inborn memory shared by a cohort can be described as “indigenous knowledge,” which transmutes a mere group into a tribe. Indigenous knowledge includes the memory that fires our neurons, the tribal achievements that fortify our spirit, the emotions that boil our blood, the bonds of love that bind us together or those of hatred that unite us. Our character arises from the cultural scripts in our indigenous knowledge. Our psyche springs from it. Our creativity sprouts from it. The tribe dominates our life, shades all the rest as outgroups, and makes indigenous knowledge our muse. We create to please the tribe, to portray it as special, favored by history or destiny, God or genes. The tribe showers us with monsoon praise and becomes our rainmaker, loudest cheerleader, and angel investor.

2) Nomad Creator: A native knows well who she is because the tribe is her identity. The journey of a nomad begins with the big question: “Why?” For this, there is no easy reply. She grows skeptical of the self-serving myth of tribal loyalty, and questions its validity in an interconnected, globalized world. Doubt is now her redoubt. She forsakes indigenous knowledge to what can be called "global knowledge"—everything in the cloud and the secrets hidden down below. Each day she searches for new facts and each hour turns into a learning exercise. The excitement she feels with each new discovery justifies her itinerancy. She can’t go home again, so she carries on. She creates for other nomads worldwide, her newfound tribe.

3) Savant Creator: Global knowledge is an infinite ocean but her brain three-pounds of tissue. The information tsunami in the library or online can dowse her creative abilities. To optimize her cognitive capacity, she must swim to that shore where she finds her potential to be the greatest. Her creativity and anticipation of discovery converge on a narrow promontory of her choice. She trains her brain to scan and store that which is relevant to her chosen domain, discarding all the rest. Once she masters her discipline, her confidence arises along with her core competency. She becomes a learned professional: a cognoscente, a savant. Now the domain becomes her tribe, and she creates for her confreres, disciples, and aficionados. 

4) Empathic Creator: Were she to grow to feel the pain of the world (weltschmerz), she can recast herself as an empathic creator—concerned with others’ welfare more than her own. As a child she was naturally empathic—the mirror neurons active in her brain always reflecting the pain of others. But as she learned to hate, she became inured, and began relishing an enemy's plight. Now she realizes that empathy is part of the survival package of humanity, and the guardian angel of both capitalism and democracy. She creates for those few who comprehend her worldview, her weltanschauung, or might understand it.

5) Spiritual Creator: Spirituality is a primordial human need, which was around even when extant religious did not exist. The chaos swirling around her life, a wretched grief, or an epiphany may inspire her to imbue her soul with a spirituality that becomes as vast as the universe. Creativity then becomes the space where the divine and the mortal meet. Her muse is now “generativity”—a term coined by self-taught psychologist Erik Erikson to denote concern for future generations. Unlike an empathic creator who is concerned about contemporaries, she reaches forward to seize upon the furthest posterity. Her creativity and spirituality become co-eternal. She creates for those yet unborn.

Knowing these five creator types is important for you to see where you fit in. Your creative purpose may reflect a single creative type or a combination of types, both for reasons of innate orientation or because you are in transition in your life, as people so often are. It is also possible that you may stop at any given stage, content to evolve your creativity from that setting over your remaining years. You can also move in either direction along the spectrum, which could form a circle for a spiritual creator who turns back to become native again. Consequently, this typology for individuals does not translate into a traditional stages approach to human creative development.

Considering nations or societies as a whole, a closer resemblance to a linear, maturational stages approach can be found. Civilizations have tended to advance most rapidly in periods of sustained, heightened creativity, such as during the Classical Greek period or the Renaissance, in part because deeper public awareness, collective freedoms, and societal transformations resulted in groups outgrowing their old creative purposes. Typically, bands of natives looked at each other and realized that they needed to get out, expand, and discover the world as nomads. Troupes of nomads influenced each other and resolved to settle down, not at a place but on domains of expertise. Cohorts of savants may have realized that their know-how alone was not enough, that it had to be leavened with empathy towards others. And finally, those who were empathic creators glided towards the spiritual, developing perspectives that embraced not just everyone, but future generations as well. This, then, is the story of human creative development.

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