“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
. . . Maya Angelou
Creativity is making something out of nothing. I’m writing a book for an inspirational woman right now. I’ve written a lot of books for people over the years, some were wonderful and others not so much, but either way, I find a creative way to get to the heart of the matter, a way to create something that wasn’t here before. I talk about the theme with my client, I ask her what she has in mind for the book and what she wants people to take away from it once they’re finished reading it. Then I mull over it for a while.
I conduct interviews with the client and when I get home, I read them back. When I feel ready to write, I sit down and something magical happens. I lose myself. I mean that in the best way. It’s as if I disappear into a different world and I write from the inside out. That’s my form of creativity. That’s heaven for me. Time disappears and I listen to the hypnotic click of the keyboard as my thoughts fly
onto the page. I don’t know where they come from as I write and delete and write and delete. I only know that after a while, I’m holding a book in my hands. I just made something out of nothing.
I also express my creativity by knitting beautiful sweaters and scarves. It starts with a pair of knitting needles and a skein of yarn. It ends with a cashmere sweater or a silk scarf. In the same way, when I hold a pelt of leather in my hands, it starts with a scissors and glue and it ends with a wallet or a fringed purse. It doesn’t matter how good the outcome is. It matters that you are flexing your creative muscles and making something that didn’t exist before.
We don’t always know what form our creativity will take. When you look inside, you may be surprised at what you find. I was working on a book with Magic Johnson when he told me that he had two aspirations when he was young. Basketball and business. He had spent his life working on both of them and he had been successful.
“You knew what you wanted to do from a young age,” I said. “What would you advise people who don’t know what they want to do?”
“I’d tell them to try everything until they find the one thing that really excites them,” he said.
We usually connect creativity to pieces of art, beautiful books, ballet performances and operas. But when you feel something knocking on your door and revving up your passion, expressing that is being creative. It’s like asking a bird, “How do you fly?” He just does. Steve Jobs said that creativity is about connecting things. When you ask a creative person how they did something, they say that they don’t know. They just saw it and brought it to life.
Maybe you’re expressing yourself in ways that you don’t recognize. My mother was an interesting example. She swore up and down that she wasn’t a creative person but I think she was wrong. Saving a buck was her creative expression and she was damned good at it. She certainly had plenty of practice.
When it was time to go shopping, she looked up sales, she cut out coupons, she researched the best prices for gas. She found designer clothing that was drastically marked down. She searched super markets in her area and she went from store to store, saving a nickel here, a quarter there. When she got up to the register to pay her bill, she kept a long line of people waiting while she pored over her
coupons until she found the right ones. And when she was finished grocery shopping, she stood outside the store, going over the receipt to make sure there were no mistakes.
I once watched her successfully return something that wasn’t returnable. She dug her heels in and stood there until the clerk gave her a refund to get rid of her. She felt satisfied when she got back home. Even though she didn’t view it that way, this was her way of being creative in life.
If you see yourself as not being creative, then you won’t be. If you see yourself as being creative, you have some wonderful worlds to explore. Being creative is the act of bringing something new into the world. Something that didn’t exist before. It’s the act of using your imagination to generate new ideas, solve problems and find satisfaction in the process. I think it’s a skill, something you can practice and get good at. See what turns you on the most and go for it. No judgments. No comparisons. No thoughts about success or failure.
We all have different expressions that exercise our minds and open our hearts. With creativity, life is filled with hope and possibility. Without it, life feels grim and tedious. Just enjoy the process and see what you can do to express yourself in an individual way.
Albert Einstein said, “Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
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