The ugly truth of creativity

This post originally appeared on medium.com/@kannarkk before I consolidated my writing here.

Be creative, they say, but not how. Be original, they say, but don’t show how. So how do you become a beautiful mind?

With clashing deadlines every week, this quarter has been an onslaught, and a true testament of my willpower. A quarter of extremely heavy workload made me realize creativity isn’t about finding that raw thought no one thought of, or a new thought that’s mind-blowing. It’s your emotional resilience when you ass has been handed back to you.

Creativity is that power to get unstuck when you feel so mired in your own thoughts, that neat hack you come up with when your code refuses to work, that intuition for a math problem that doesn’t seem to become any simpler with more thoughts.

Creativity is finding those small ‘hacks’ that connect the dots. My manager at my previous job at Oracle didn’t like that term. He would say, “Anyone can code. But bringing things together — that’s not a hack. It requires skill. Calling it a hack is disrespectful of your own abilities.” Sometimes I feel we are so lost in a thousand definitions of creativity, that we disrespect ourselves by calling us stupid.

We think creativity is that innovative thought that should revolutionize the world. But every thing starts small and ‘unspecial’.

Creativity is the output of an unfettered mind, left free to figure things out, build stuff, make things. Creativity isn’t awesomeness by definition, the journey is.