Future Skills

CHAPTER 8CREATIVITY

Creativity has without doubt enabled us to become the species we are. And I'm not just talking creativity in terms of fine art, music, performing arts, architecture, and the like. I'm talking about a humbler definition of creativity: the ability to dream a different future and bring ideas to life. When you think of creativity this way, it becomes startingly clear that we all have the ability to be creative, and most of us use that ability every day—whether you're an artist or an accountant.

What Is Creativity?

Creativity is the act of turning imaginative ideas into reality. Therefore, to be creative is to go through two processes: thinking and then producing. The producing part is key. You may have amazing ideas, but if you don't act on those ideas, you're not creating. In other words, imagination isn't the same as creativity; creativity means bringing ideas to life. Again, this doesn't mean you have to produce a museum-worthy piece of art to be deemed creative; producing solutions to a problem by imagining different scenarios is creative. Whatever the outcome, we're talking about bringing something new into the world.

In his book The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional, Augustin Fuentes argues that this ability to imagine something and then make it real is what differentiates us from other species—and has driven the evolution of the human race. From creating complex (and beautiful) tools to domesticating plants and animals, creativity ...