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(Warning: mostly stream of consciousness, not guaranteed to be not rambly)

As a kid growing up, I was always under the impression that people were creative or not.  I equated creativity with being a painter, musician, etc.  For some reason, it seemed ingrained in me that creative people just had all their ideas just pop into their head without trying, and even when I tried to be creative, I always ended up being less productive than usual.

This conception of mine persisted through most of high school and into college.  Not as acute as when I was a kid, but I still never felt that I could be much of an artist or anything because I never saw myself as being creative.  I tried writing, but was plagued by perpetual writers block.  I outright avoided painting or drawing because I couldn’t do either very well, let alone even come up with creative ideas to put on paper.

To compound things, growing up I was always a thinker.  I always approached things I did as some what of input/output, even without really recognizing or labeling it as such.  From school work to fiddling with my computer, there was always some thing there that I took, processed, and came up with something else.  This was my M.O.  This was just how my mind worked because I wasn’t creative, despite getting comments from adults from time to time about my creativity.  Since I didn’t feel like I was doing anything special, just input/output, I never thought anything of those comments.

Through the past two and a half years(?) or so though, I’ve been reexamining how I approach everything in life, creativity included.  I’ve figured out how to hack my mindset to become more social and to be able to actually enjoy the single life, so why not hack in some creativity while I’m at it.  After all, my approach to those should be generalizable, right?

I’ve posted about reframing before, and it end’s up coming into the picture (hah, get it?) again here.  I had to start off examining what creativity is at its base.  As a kid, I always saw the end product of creativity, not the process.  I saw paintings or heard music and thought, “how in the world could someone make that? I never could do that.”  It only took me finishing college for me to put all the pieces together.  I know, I’m a bit of a slow learner at times, but when things click, I see fireworks.

I kept seeing creativity as a gift, some talent people innately had, instead of a process people went through.  Between doing more photography and having control over my own direction at work, I finally figured out just how creative I can be, and how I actually work.  My process is still amorphous and in the making, but more and more lately, I’ve found myself more full of new ideas than ever before.  My problem in the past was trying to be creative, trying to produce new ideas through shear force of will.  Misguided, yes, but so are many things that people grow up believing.

By changing how I viewed creativity and it’s relationship to me, I think I’ve managed to reconnect with something I had as a child, but got trampled by public education and it’s focus on input/output.  As those who work with me know, I have a bit of a propensity for being mildly ADD.  I’ve found though, that therein lies the key to my creativity.  I’ll be off working on XYZ and think of some random idea to improve ABC.  I can’t just sit down and think through “what kind of iphone app could I make for phone?”  For a nerdy analogy, I’m more GPU than CPU. (lots of slower pipelines vs one big fast one).

I suppose the best analogy for my creative process is this comic from XKCD.

I’ll start with one thing, think of a couple related things, and repeat.  Eventually I can find a way to combine my love of technical things and my love of photography into a project of building my own intervalometer to take time-lapse night scenes of East Lansing.  I’ve found I have a knack for mixing up and manipulating things, and I’ve finally consciously realized that that’s the heart of creativity.

It’s not randomly pulling ideas out of your ass, but putting a bunch of random ideas in there, mixing them together, and then pulling something new out.

Hopefully this wasn’t too rambly and made a bit of sense, but this is basically how my thoughts flow.