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Live with Creativity
I believe creativity is a muscle, not a skill. That is, you get more creative by building a practice of being creative. It’s not a thing you either are or are not. (Related: I believe that’s also true of athleticism. I was told my entire childhood that I was not athletic, so I didn’t try to be. Then in my 20s I decided to try and what do you know? I ran 3 marathons, climbed Kilimanjaro, learned to ski black diamonds, etc.)
We were all creative as children: we invented friends, wrote stories, drew monsters and flowers and families on any surface we could find, and many of us growing up in the 80s and 90s learned to entertain ourselves for hours on road trips or lazy Saturday afternoons before smart phones and other technology came along to distract us. Yet as we grew up and began to focus our time and attention on a career much of that creativity fell to the side. Unless we chose careers in the arts (and I define that broadly: storytelling, design, performance of all kinds, etc.) we probably don’t get to exercise this muscle on a daily basis.