Creativity. Is. More. Than. Art.

I’ve taught creativity for 15 years.

If I had a dime for every time someone told me they “weren’t creative” … welp, I’d have made more money than I ever did teaching it.

Creativity. Is. More. Than. Art.

Fine art is great. Like, really really great. Love me some torturous calls for help from El Greco. Frida makes me think deep, man.

But creativity is not confined to world-class museums, or even canvas, or even anything that anyone will ever notice.

These might sound familiar: Do you experiment with flavors in your kitchen? Arrange dinner in the shape of a smiley face? Build a kick-ass marketing strategy? Rewrite a sentence until it finally clicks?

You’re creative. You’re literally creating something that did not exist before. A thought that’s never been thought that way before. Carrot teeth and green-pea eyes under a broccoli nose arranged just slightly differently than anyone has done it before, and appreciated by different kids.

In creativity research, they call it little-c creativity

There’s big-C Creativity, of course. The paintings of Michelangelo at the Louvre, the mind-trip movies from Jordan Peele, a Taylor Swift song.

But even most of their lives are filled with the same smaller moments we all share. I think of it as mini- or micro- or even nano-creativity.

You make something that is 0.00001% new to you. That’s it. Not new to the world, new to you. It’s 99.9999999% of the creativity that happens every day, and it counts.

The actual process of writing most of the books or articles I’ve written? Yes it’s mildly creative, but it’s not even close to the more creative things I’ve done: from navigating how to ask for a raise to world-building novels no one will probably ever read.