Choose to be Creative!

Who do you think are creative? Most people would probably think about Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Affandi, Basuki Abdullah, or some of the lesser-known artists they like. But are artists the only people who can be considered as creative? And does one have to be well-known to be labeled as creative?

Some time back, we were putting together a presentation to explain, among other things, that creativity isn’t “a gift doled out sparingly by the gods” (Ulrich Kraft, Scientific American Mind) and that creativity isn’t confined to the realms of the arts.

We set out to find examples of people who represent creative achievements in different fields. We listed Bill Gates as the creative businessman who envisioned the use of the personal computer in every house. Maria Montessori as the creative educator who thought that children should be allowed to handle and access real materials as means for learning. Andy Warhol as the creative artist who turned everyday things like Campbell’s soup cans into art.

Gandhi as the creative politician who insisted that independence could be gained without waging a war. Thomas Edison as the creative inventor who persisted until he reached a solution to his problems. Albert Einstein as the creative scientist who saw how the world operated in a new and radical way.

Only one artist among all the creative people.

We also listed Bono (U2’s lead singer) as the creative humanitarian. Granted, Bono’s reputation as a gifted singer and songwriter has earned him world-wide reputation and can be labeled creative in itself, but we listed him as the creative humanitarian because he used his reputation as a bargaining power to gain support for humanitarian causes.

What were the common traits of these creative people? They saw things that others didn’t (Gates, Warhol, Montessori), they imagined (Einstein, Gandhi, Gates), they were not afraid to stand out as different (Warhol, Gandhi), they had the courage to act on their ideas (Gandhi, Bono), and they persisted and worked very hard to succeed (Edison, Einstein).

Looking for eminent creative people from different fields was easy, but what about examples of creative people who are not our obvious creative type? When we set out to look for less eminent examples of creativity (or what the literature terms “everyday creativity”), we were enlightened indeed.

We found a scavenger who tugged excessive cartloads of rubbish by reining himself to the cart he was pulling, similar to the way human rein an ox or a horse (see picture). Why was the scavenger creative? Well, we figured that he had to solve the problem of “How to lug heavy loads around the streets of Jakarta?” in order to maximize his trips on foot. Horses and oxen can carry heavy loads. Most likely, the scavenger stretched his imagination from this piece of knowledge and used the same principle to help him pull his cart.

We found a man who sits in a corner on the street down the road from our office who sells pre-packed rice boxes. Maybe he couldn’t afford to knock up a kaki-lima but that didn’t stop him from selling food. He prepares the food at home. Seeing his problem from a different perspective, from “How to find money to knock up a kaki-lima?” to “How to sell food on the streets?”

We found Kayee’s domestic cook, Mery, who can whip up a meal no matter what scant ingredients are left in the fridge. She is able to deviate from the instructions from cookbooks, to substitute the ingredients that she doesn’t have, to combine recipes when she only has a bit of this and that, and to dare to test her employer’s palate. Kayee, being used to salad dressing being eaten straight out of the bottle, was shocked then pleasantly surprised when Mery actually used it to cook a meat sauce! Mery doesn’t do things just because books tell her to. She thinks. She looks for alternatives. She seeks possibilities.

Then there is Dewi’s dad who found he had freezing cold hands during a vacation to New Zealand. Rush out to buy gloves? That’s probably a solution that doesn’t challenge the creative mind enough. Dewi’s dad put maroon socks on his hands instead. Not afraid to stand out from the crowd, seeing socks in a new way and simply believing that there must be a solution with the resources he had. Persistent and optimistic in finding a solution.

We also found our colleague Petra, who managed to see through our array of work problems and summed it up in one sentence for us. During a series of team meetings, we explored issues that held back performance in the past year and concluded on a few issues. Examples include the communication gap between the different departments, people working on projects with different expectations and harbored feelings over time leading to compromised work relations.

Just as the team was about to embark on how to resolve these issues, Petra piped that the real problem was the lack of honest communication! True, if we had communicated honestly about how we feel about people, relationships and projects, most of our problems could have been ironed out on the go.

What were the common traits of these ‘everyday’ creative people? Again, they saw things that others didn’t, they imagined, they were not afraid to stand out as different, they had the courage to act on their ideas and they persisted and worked very hard to succeed in resolving their everyday problems.

Big problems or small problems. Solutions that impact the world or solutions that solve the small hiccups in your work or personal life. When we are faced with problems or challenges that we haven’t encountered before or that we have no known solutions for, if we are optimistic that a solution can be found, if we think, imagine, and take action, then surely we can find solution to the problem. That is what we call creativity.

If you think back now to some problems that you have faced, problems that you didn’t have known solutions for; how did you react? Did you forget about the problem? Did you leave it as a problem for someone else to solve? Did you tell yourself that nothing can be done about it? Or did you amuse yourself in finding a solution?

Based on how we define creativity, we believe that everyone can be creative. Based on how we define creativity, we also believe that creativity is a choice. In all the examples that we have given, perhaps except for the scavenger and the food seller (whom we think had no choice but to think up solutions for survival), people were faced with a problem or a challenge: the choice was theirs to make in how to react to the situation.

This availability of choice often prevents us from taking the creative route because it’s easier to opt for the alternative: don’t think about it and do nothing about it. However, we can assure you that by taking the creative route, your everyday living will be like walking out of a manhole in to a vast expanse - possibilities begin to open up.

Kayee’s favorite example of her own everyday creativity occured when a small object fell down the plug-hole in her bathroom basin. The object was too wide to retrieve with fingers or tweezers. Kayee’s solution was to use a ‘stick and retrieve’ strategy: turn a glue stick upside down, stick it onto the object and pull the object up. Not quite the same as winning a Nobel Prize, but the feeling of solving the problem made her day.

Dewi’s favorite example of everyday creativity is exemplified by a group of children, Tiffani, Matthew, Kenzie and Patrick, who like to play in our studio. Led by the eight-year old Tiffani, every week they come up with new games. In the past few weeks, they have worked on an idea to create a new kind of pen. Their first pass was to put ink inside a straw that was covered with cloth on one end. It didn’t work too well as the diameter of the straw was too small for the ink not to spill all over.

Their second pass was to use a cut-up hose with cloth cover on one end. This one worked better as they could fill the pen without spilling any ink, but the cloth was too porous and the ink ran really fast. Their next passes were a set of experimentations with the type of cloths to use, trying to figure out which ones work better for making what kind of mark. Their last attempt as of a week ago was to put cloth on both ends of the hose, making a pen with double end. They even came up with a name for it: lipstick pen.

As our motto goes: Dare to think. Dare to imagine. Dare to persist. That is what we call creativity.