Many people mistakenly think they lack the ability to be creative. To them, creativity is a mysterious, mountain top phenomena, inherited and therefore unavailable to them.
I trained as a geneticist, so “Is it inherited?” is an important question to me. After all, if creativity is inherited like IQ, little can be done to help a person with low creative ability.
Consider these creativity skills:
- Keeping an open mind, switching tracks, seeing new perspectives, shifting paradigms, and generating different mindsets.
- Associating remote stimuli in the environment with elements in the mind and combining them into new and unusual ideas.
- Generating many ideas.
- Adopting different problem-solving approaches.
- Generating a variety of genuinely different ideas.
- Developing ideas.
- Generating infrequent and uncommon ideas.
- Going against consensus and persisting in the face of criticism.
Few of these skills seem inherited. Most seem learnable through training.
Research comparing identical and fraternal twins on creativity tests found that differences between identical twins were similar to differences between fraternal twins. Concordance is low. This suggests that these creativity skills do not have a large genetic contribution. I will be glad to refer you to the many research articles dealing with these experiments if you are interested.
This is good news. If creativity were inherited, I would end here with condolences: sorry, what you have is what you will always have, and creativity training will not help. Instead, the opposite is true. Most people with reasonable mental ability can become more creative by learning advanced creativity procedures.
Escape the Myth
The myth that creativity has a large inherited component can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: nothing can harm a highly creative person, and nothing can help a person who considers themselves less creative. Not so on either account.
First, research on identical and fraternal twins suggests that most creativity skills are probably not strongly inherited.
Second, you can learn creativity procedures and enhance your creative thinking skills.
Third, creativity is greatly affected by the job environment and other external factors.
Finally, success as a creative person depends not only on creativity procedures, but also on talent and ability, inherited or otherwise, motivation to be creative, and interpersonal skills for selling ideas.
Two Creativity-Spoiling Habits
One devastating creativity-spoiling habit is thinking you are not creative. This negative put-down spoils your attempts to be creative. Keep in mind that creativity procedures are learned, not inherited. You can learn to be more creative by learning advanced creativity procedures.
The other side of the coin is thinking you have been very creative when you have not.
If you do not use advanced problem-solving procedures for creative thinking, you will not reach your full potential. Solutions to work-related problems will lack the zest and yeastiness that advanced creativity procedures can bring to your thinking. Your solutions will not be as creative or as high quality as they might be.
Do not let either habit stop you.
Edward Glassman, PhD, was President of Creativity College® and Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he led the Program for Team Effectiveness and Creativity.