What on earth was I thinking? I had been a creativity consultant for more than a decade and an amateur magician since I was a teenager, yet I did not recognize the elegant creativity in constructing a magic trick until I recently wrote two books on the topic.
There I was, writing about the secret behind a fine trick, when it finally struck me as immensely creative.
The Illusion
Consider this card magic trick. I tell a spectator-volunteer that he has magical talent. To test his potential, I ask him to perform a trick with my coaching.
I give him the deck and ask him to have me:
- select a card,
- put it back into the deck,
- cut the deck and place it on the table.
I ask him to name my card. I tell him, say, the 3 of clubs.
Then I ask him to say that he will reach into the deck with his mind and reverse my card, the 3 of clubs, so it rests face-up in the face-down deck. He closes his eyes to "mentally enter" the deck and reverse the card. After a moment, I suggest that he look through the deck to see if he succeeded.
Sure enough, he finds a card turned upside down: my chosen card, the 3 of clubs. Wow. I ask him not to reveal how he did the trick.
How do you think I carried out this deception? Remember, I did not touch the cards.
The Secret
Before suggesting the trick, I secretly turned over the bottom card of the deck, say the 3 of clubs, memorized it, and placed it second from the bottom.
Later, when asked the identity of my chosen card, I answered 3 of clubs, not the card I had actually picked. Since I had turned over the 3 of clubs before the trick, the spectator found it reversed in the deck.
Simple and easy.
This bewildering trick oozes creativity. Yet I recognized the elegant creativity behind it only when I wrote about it. Before that, I thought the trick was clever, not necessarily creative. The same applied to all the magic tricks I knew.
Isn't this what we do every day when we encounter an unusual idea? We often fail to recognize the creativity behind it. Instead, we call it ingenious, tinkering, Yankee ingenuity, intuitive, trial-and-error, novel, imaginative, clever, witty, smart, or inventive. Anything but creativity.
We think creativity is an exceptional gift inherited by other people.
Not true. Almost all people think creatively most of the time. What matters is what you spend your time creating. Best of all, creativity techniques can help solve problems in all areas of life and work.
Many levels of creativity exist, from low, everyday levels to hot, unexpected, focused levels. You can increase the probability of operating at a higher level by using advanced creativity techniques to solve problems creatively, create a creative atmosphere in your mind and life, and stop pigeonholing yourself and other people.
Some people think innovation requires creativity only during the generation of the big-bang idea. After that comes hard, dull work. Purely a myth.
Creativity solves on-the-job problems throughout the innovation process. We usually call it something else, such as messing about or fooling around. On-the-job creativity drives the daily process of transforming and combining old ideas into new ones, adding spice throughout innovation.
Now try to identify an object in your life that is not an outcome of someone's creativity. That's where the magic hides.
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.