One of the open questions in the realm of creativity is: Are people born creative, or do they become creative? It’s akin to the nature versus nurture debate which permeates life—intelligence, health, longevity and even mood. As for creativity, it’s best said that even if one weren’t born creative, there are sufficient avenues to gain creativity post facto. After all, creativity, unlike height or the colour of one’s eyes, can only be known upon demonstration, which again brings nurture into the equation. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould settled the nature-nurture debate, stating, 'It is logically, mathematically, and philosophically impossible to pull them apart.' Let’s now talk about the controllable: nurture.
Before we delve into the paradoxes of the creative type, let’s establish why creativity has become so important. At a time when the most repetitive, structured tasks are cornered by AI, there’s little left of us to engage. When almost all human interactions are mediated with nameless, faceless technological layers, the twin currency of the future are empathy and creativity. Empathy is to understand the problems, and creativity is to solve those ingeniously and pass the solution to machines to be then perfected and scaled. Both empathy and creativity are unique to humans, except not everyone is in the lead, for while we are making machines more human, we humans, alas, are becoming more like machines. Creativity, as in coming up with ideas which are novel and useful, is largely the preserve of humans (so far).
A deep dive into the history of creativity in arts, sciences and different domains makes it evident that creativity comes in all shapes, size and from all backgrounds. You have Leonardo da Vinci, born as an illegitimate child, talked in the same breath as Rabindranath Tagore, born to one of India’s wealthiest households. Both Srinivasa Ramanujan, who signed off at the age of 32, and John Goodenough, one to bag a Nobel at age 97, invite wonderment. Common across the creative types are some paradoxical attributes, or better still habits, which all of us can cultivate. Let’s discuss three of those.
The creators are highly productive but not highly efficient. Rahman would work every minute of every night and yet take six months to compose the score of Taal. Christopher Nolan would labour on Inception for well over ten years and yet perform the entire sequence of the Trinity nuclear test explosion in Oppenheimer in a single shot. Stephen King would write 2000 clean words a day, and yet none of his 100 novels have even remotely similar openings yet inducing primal fear, as in It. How do they manage it? By inviting errors, mistakes, detours, inefficiencies, reworks, false starts, about-turns and dead ends right into their work.
A productivity savant abhors variation, while the creativity exponent invites variation. She knows, much like nature, that the kernel of evolution lies in variation – most of which will be wasteful, but occasionally you get the sparks flying. And that is worth all the trouble.
The creators are multi-threaders and not multi-taskers. High productivity might mistake one into construing that creativity thrives in multitasking, in putting multiple irons in the fire, but here again the creative types are deceptive. They take a portfolio approach to work and are maniacally focused on one activity at a time. They switch between role, but never parallel tasking, much like Amir Khusro, the 13th-century poet, historian, composer, musician, writer, choreographer, philosopher, courtier, warrior, scholar and mystic. Known by his sobriquet Tuti-e-Hind (Parrot of India), Khusro is also credited to have shaped two languages—Hindi and Urdu—and birthing the Hindustani classical music. Haruki Murakami maintains a schedule of running, swimming, playing music and writing – one activity at a time. Viswanathan Anand toggles between astronomy, reading, writing, literature and chess, and never out of a move. They pack their day and life with variety, but within each task is dogged perseverance.
The creators are deep hearted and thick skinned at the same time. Being deep hearted is about demonstrating empathy, understanding the unmet and unaddressed needs of the people around you. Thick skin gives the ability to materialise in the face of external criticism and internal doubts. Without deep heart there is seldom inspiration, and without a thick skin there’s rarely any creation. It was the deep heart of Maria Montessori that let her understand the plight of the underprivileged children and then her thick skin that gave us a radical view of education that flies in the face of industrialised teaching. Shahnaz Husain’s deep heart offered her the hint of how beauty needn’t be skin deep, but her thick skin let her take Ayurveda to over 100 countries at a time when India was best known for forgettable reasons.
Creativity is everywhere, but creation is rare. The gap is materialisation, and there are few who have taken a leap by embracing the paradoxes of being productive while inviting errors, maintaining a portfolio of enterprise without multitasking, and honing a deep heart with a thick skin. The rarity of creation stems from the difficulties in thinking and living paradoxically. Alas, you always have a choice. What’s your script?