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creative intelligence
written by SAI
filed under CAREER | LIFESTYLE | MINDSET
published JANUARY 29, 2024
TLDR
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Creativity defined as ideas generated per unit of input
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Ideas are expressed as a combination of the 5 senses
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2 creativity types are 1) Combinatorial Creativity and 2) Intuitive Creativity
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2 creativity factors are Awareness and Experiences
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Measure your creativity by consuming information for a set period of time and generating ideas for a set period of time
What You're Saying To Yourself Now
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“I’m not creative.”
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“I’m not artistic.”
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“How do I become creative?”
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“How do I increase my awareness?”
If you’ve found yourself saying any of these things, then this essay is for you.
For the longest time, I thought that I wasn’t creative. That being creative was something other people did. I didn’t make creativity happen.
I’ve since learned that that mindset wasn’t serving me be my best self.
And that’s exactly what that is. A mindset. Something that can change. You are not born creative or uncreative. It is a skill that can be cultivated, like any other skill in life.
I do have to owe a lot to the folks at 2ULaundry for allowing me to experiment with my budding creativity throughout my 3.5 years there. Not just directly, but also indirectly. I was in a marketing position that challenged me yet enabled me to explore my creative sides outside of work.
Throughout that time, I’ve had a blog, YouTube vlog, newsletter (THIS!), podcast, anonymous YouTube music channel, and exhaustively written in countless diaries. I wouldn’t have considered myself any sort of content creator a few years ago, but now I certainly am that. Dare I say it takes some level of a creative person to do all these things consistently to a certain extent.
So how did I learn this skill of creativity? Keep reading to find out.
what is creativity?
As is the case with most of my newsletters, let’s start with actually defining the term that we’re discussing.
I define creativity as ideas generated per unit of input.
The input can be measured in terms of time or content consumed.
So the more ideas you generate within a certain amount of time, the more creative you are. Inversely, the fewer ideas you generate from reading a chapter within a book, the less creative you are.
Creativity is number of ideas generated per unit of input.
You may be wondering what I mean by ideas as well. I have a very broad definition of ideas here. Ideas can be expressed as a combination of all 5 senses
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Sight
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Hearing
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Taste
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Touch
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Smell
Think of someone who you would label as ‘creative.’ Their creative expression should check at least one of these boxes.
For example, a dancer can be creative through their sight, hearing, and touch senses. What moves they include in their choreography, the music they choose to dance to, and if it’s a partner piece, how the two partners flow and interact together.
A chef can also be highly creative. In fact, they have the potential to actually hit on all 5 senses. What is the visual presentation of the food? Obviously, what taste do they want you to have when you eat their food? What is the texture of the food, especially if it’s something you’re eating with your hands? How does it smell, and what feelings does that induce? And even, how does the food sound? It could be the sizzling of fajitas or tandoori chicken that makes your mouth water.
The point is think of creativity as ideas expressed through a combination of all 5 senses.
types of creativity
Where do these ideas come from? I categorize the sources of inspiration into two buckets:
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Connective or Combinatorial Creativity
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Pure or Intuitive Creativity
Connective or combinatorial creativity can also be broken down into the same 5 senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. This is when you connect or combine two or more ideas into something unique.
A straightforward example is disc golf. There was the sport of golf. And there was the sport, or at least the sporting item, of a frisbee. Someone was like “wait, what if we played golf but with like a frisbee instead?” Thus, disc golf was born.
Their creative sources were sight and touch and their creative ideas were expressed also through sight and touch in the form of disc golf.
Pure or intuitive creativity occurs seemingly out of thin air. If connective creativity comes from the abundance of stimuli, then pure creativity comes from the absence of stimuli. It’s when your mind is silent and you can hear the thoughts coming in. If you’re spiritual or religious, you might even call the messenger of these thoughts God or the Holy Spirit or the Universe. 👀
An example of this is when you’re perhaps in the shower. Your mind has turned off to a degree. You’re going through your regular habitual motions. That allows the mind to become empty. And then…an “Aha!” or “Eureka!” moment. Seemingly out of nowhere.
Are these mutually exclusive? No. There’s probably a bit of overlap but these are just frames of reference to describe the types of creativity.
For example, Kobe Bryant (RIP 🙏) explained how he came up with the title of ‘Detail’ for his show. He had a general idea of what he wanted the show to be about for a year, but was struggling for that perfect title. Then one day, he was shopping and noticed the little details on the fabric of clothes. BOOM! DETAIL! That was it. He felt it.
In this case, it was a combination of connective creativity (connecting the dots of a sports TV show title and fabric while shopping) and pure creativity (planting the seed and letting his mind wander and do nothing…until the Eureka moment!).
This Kobe Detail example also is a great way to understand the 2 factors of creativity, and how we can consciously increase our own creativity.
2 factors of creativity
The primary factors of creativity are:
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Awareness
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Experiences
To be more creative, increase one or both of these.
Normally, we would just take a look at clothes for their functionality and style. That’s where our awareness of it stops. But Kobe chose to focus his awareness on the very minute details of the fabric. Going a layer or two deeper than most. Increased awareness.
And if he wasn’t in that spot to begin with — shopping looking at clothes — he may never have had that experience to spark his creativity. Increased experiences.
Increased awareness and increased experiences combined, he was able to come up with the answer that truly felt right to him.
“Sai, how do I increase my awareness? I feel like I’m not too aware of things.” You’re in luck, because awareness is also a skill that can be cultivated over time.
Awareness is the ability to perceive. So how do you increase awareness? Simple: you perceive more. You observe more. Through your five senses. Of your own thoughts. Of your feelings.
You increase the granularity of the things you observe. Become more descriptive. You slow down your mind and body to do these things more effortlessly.
For example, have you ever said “Oh, that looks easy enough. I could do that.” Then you actually try it and you’re greatly humbled. For me, that was Tai Chi. It looks simple enough to move slowly and make the seemingly correct movements. But the balance, grace, power, and precision that’s required is like the 90% of the iceberg that’s beneath the water. It can take years, decades to perfect a single movement. But you can only get to that level of detailed practice when you have awareness of its presence in the first place.
This is a tangential benefit of increased awareness. You gain more gratitude and respect. You start to understand the amount of highly precise practice that it required to make it look effortless.
Back to sports, have you ever heard an announcer say “they can see things in slow motion” or “see things before they happen” or “high basketball / football IQ”. These are all referencing the same thing - heightened awareness. Perceiving the smallest of details. Which is done through slowing down their craft to get those smallest details 100% correct. If a high basketball IQ player like LeBron James can notice 10 things during a play while a more average player notices just 5, then that’s so much more of an advantage. Multiply that by every play throughout the whole game, and that’s how you get such a high basketball IQ.
But what if we thought about time freedom in the context of a RACI matrix. Are you just consulted and informed of how you’ll spend your time based on the demands of others? Or are you truly responsible and accountable for your time? Do you have autonomy over it?
how you can increase awareness
So how can you practice increasing your awareness?
Here’s a simple exercise:
In the next 5 minutes, write down all the things you’re aware of. All 5 senses and your thoughts and feelings as well. They don’t necessarily have to be complete sentences, bullet points are fine.
Do this exercise for a week and see the differences in how much you notice about yourself, others, and your surroundings.
Other ways to increase awareness that has other positive benefits is through compliments and gratitude.
I love Troy Hawke’s compliment social media videos. He doesn’t just say something like “You look very beautiful” or “I love that suit on you.” He makes the compliments *extremely* specific, sometimes even arcane. “Your vibe is genius artist turned creative corporate legend.” “Sweet vibe, sir. Human Ibizan sunset.”
Challenge yourself to be very specific with your compliments. And see how others react to them. 😄
Another simple way to increase awareness is to practice very granular gratitude. Instead of “I’m grateful for my friends and family”, say something like “I’m grateful for John because he was there to validate my feelings today when I needed emotional support.” Instead of “I’m grateful for my job”, say something like “I’m grateful that I put a smile on a customer’s face today when I simply asked how their day was and we joked around for a few minutes.”
These are very specific instances that you’re grateful for, not just generic statements that you could repeat at any point in life. When you start practicing gratitude for those smaller things, you notice them more often, and you feel even more grateful for them, and so on. It’s a virtuous cycle.
how you can increase experiences
Now the second factor of creativity: experiences.
How do you have more experiences? The simple, “duh” answer is just do more stuff. Put yourself out there. But what does that mean exactly?
Here are a few simple ways to break that down.
Use the basic question words to guide if it’s an experience you’ve had before or not.
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Who - can I have a experience with different people?
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What - can the main activity of my experience be different?
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Where - can the place of my experience be different?
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When - can the time of my experience be different?
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How - can how I perceive the experience during it be different?
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Why - can my intentions coming into the experience be different?
Even if one of these factors is different from a previous experience, that’s mission accomplished in terms of having a new experience. You’ll be able to draw upon it.
Now back to your 5 senses. Use your five senses to guide how you can experience something differently.
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Sight - can I see something different that I haven’t seen before?
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Hear - can I hear something different that I haven’t heard before?
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Touch - can I touch or make something different that I haven’t touched or made before?
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Taste - can I taste something different that I haven’t tasted before?
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Smell - can I smell something different that I haven’t smelled before?
A couple of those may seem weird to ask, as most new experiences you have fall into the first 2-3 categories. The point is to be exhaustive of your senses when brainstorming new experiences.
The third way to look at experiences holistically is in the context of my Learning Zone model, which breaks things down in terms of actions and contexts. The main questions to ask yourself are:
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Is there a familiar action I can do within a new context?
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Is there a new action I can do within a familiar context?
And if you’re feeling brave enough,
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Is there a new action I can take within a new context?
There are definitely overlaps of these frameworks, they are not mutually exclusive. So use whichever one appeals to you the most.
The point of having these new experiences in some manner is to put yourself in position to have more Combinatorial Creativity because there are more potential sources of inspiration from which to draw.
How to Measure Your Creativity
Coming back to creativity as a whole, how do we measure that? Because my claim is you can increase creativity, but what does “increased creativity” look like?
For a baseline, consume some information for 10 minutes. Then for another 10 minutes, write down all the things that come to mind. Doesn’t have to be fully formed paragraphs or even sentences. But just enough of a thought that if you read it again, you can pick back up and go deeper.
Then keep practicing the ways to increase your awareness and experiences. It’s not going to be an immediate difference within a week. But over the course of weeks, months, you’ll start noticing the impact when you do the same baseline test. You’ll have documented lots more ideas, thoughts, sentence fragments, diagrams, illustrations, and more.
These techniques will increase Combinatorial Creativity. Increasing Intuitive Creativity is a bit more advanced, which we can discuss in the future. The basic how-to of that is, paradoxically, to do fewer things.
As creativity has flowed through me with increasingly more ease the past few years, I have actually felt when I’m about to have what I call an idea blitz or a creative outburst. It’s like the snowball that’s starting to roll down hill. You know exactly where it’s headed and you have no way or intention of stopping it. In those cases, I make sure I have 0 distractions and be near something where I can document all those ideas.
I’ve noticed that this has happened more frequently, more effortlessly, and dare I say more on-demand. In living like this, overall working time is more efficient. Instead of 2 hours of head scratching, staring at a blank page, or stop and start distracted work, I knock the same amount of work out in 30-45 minutes.
By practicing increasing your awareness and experiences through the methods above, you too can naturally increase your creativity.
wrapping up
Let’s revisit some sentences you might find yourself saying.
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“I’m not creative.”
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“How do I become creative?”
Rewire the belief of that first bullet that you can become creative. You are creative, you just may not have known how. But now you do!
By practicing increasing your awareness and experiences through the methods above, you too can naturally increase your creativity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sai is a Life Coach for Young Adults seeking to Live their Quarter Life on Easy Mode!