Everyone is Creative

How to nourish and flourish your own creative style.

By Kelle Walsh, Imagine Magazine (Fall, 2004).

Creativity Portal was granted permission by the publisher of Imagine Magazine to reprint this article. It contains an excerpt from an interview with Chris Dunmire, the Creative Director of the Creativity Portal Web site.

If you've ever taken a class in drawing, painting or pottery, and despite your best effort, couldn't make the final result look anything like the model shown, you may have thought, "I don't have a creative bone in my body."

According to scientists, who for the past 20 years have put the elusive subject of creativity through the rigors of research, you'd be wrong. Da Vinci you may never be, but when it comes to creativity, we all possess the tools necessary to expand our creative horizons. It's learning to use them, and then applying them in everything you do, that counts.

"Even if we don't have the good fortune to discover a new chemical element or write a great story, the love of the creative process for its own sake is available to all," says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Creativity: Flow and Psychology of Discovery and Invention.

The realm of creativity has often been awarded to those perceived to have special talent. We look upon these "creative geniuses," as we often call them, with awe and a bit of envy. Their gifts, we assume, are bestowed by good genes, or, as if in Greek mythology, from some kind of divine inspiration.

There is no argument that the world is full of highly talented and creative people. They are masters of their trades and stand heads-and-shoulders above their peers, forging new pathways for others to follow, and providing greater context and understanding of our world. It could be said that without creativity humanity would not evolve.

But like a professional baseball player who hones his skill through years of almost obsessive diligence, foregoing other activities for his one true love, people who move from their creative center work hard to cultivate their natural talents.

After studying 91 creative and influential people, including novelists, playwrights, composers, musicians,

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About the Author
Kelle Walsh is a journalist based in Santa Cruz, California. Creativity Portal was granted permission by the publisher of Imagine Magazine to reprint this article.