What is Personal Creativity?

We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up to discover what is already there. (Henry Miller)

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/DSS

What is creativity? As I discovered in my quest for an answer to this question, it all depends on the context in which creativity is defined, and, beyond what you will find in dictionaries, there are various and numerous definitions for the concept.[1] Among all the definitions for creativity, I found some consensus that creativity essentially consists of at least two aspects:

1 A creative idea or product must be novel, original or new.
2 It must also be of value according to some kind of external benchmark, or appropriate in a context or useful in some way to society.

However, there are subcategories of creativity that are defined, such as ‘small c’ (or ‘everyday creativity’, which is to produce something new and meaningful, such as in problem-solving) and ‘big C’ (or ‘eminent creativity’, which is to produce something that achieves social recognition and serves a wider social purpose).[2]  Beghetto and Kaufman define a further category: ‘We define mini-c creativity as the novel and personally meaningful interpretation of experiences, actions, and events’.[3]

So, it seems that mini-c creativity helps us to find personal meaning in our individual lives. I suppose it is like looking within to the experiences of our own lives for meaning rather than looking outside to a belief or organisation to supply that meaning.

Mark Runco, well known for his work on personal creativity, says: ‘… creative potential is a part of the basic human tendency to construct (personal) interpretations and assimilate information as we experience it. Everyone does that, and sometimes we can use these interpretive capacities to construct original insights. These may remain personal and simply help the individual to understand or appreciate his or her experience, or they may be shared, applied, elaborated and so on, in which case they may eventually become an objectively creative product or performance.’[4]

I agree that we all have the potential to be creative. Also, once again, it seems that creativity seems to have something to do with finding meaning in our individual lives and experiences by looking within. However, I like to focus on how much creativity can help you to enjoy life, and I think that pleasure and excitement are important aspects of creativity. Have fun on the journey of exploring, discovering and developing your personal creativity and the deeper experience of finding meaning in your life will emerge from within.

Look for synonyms for creativity, and you will find concepts such as originality, imagination, inspiration, ingenuity, inventiveness, resourcefulness, creativeness and vision. These concepts reflect both essential aspects of creativity – the novel, original and new of ideas, and the value or appropriateness of the product of creativity.

Overall, my approach to personal creativity is closest to Mark Runco’s explanation, and thus I define personal creativity as the expression of your unique and individual ideas, which are novel, original or new in some way, in some concrete form. Whether this manifestation of your distinctive ideas is of value to, appropriate for or useful for others is not excluded, but is not a necessary criterion for personal creativity. To put it simply, you do not have to produce award-winning art in order to be personally creative as the act of producing a unique and individual artwork is creative in itself.

In the materialistic market-driven world of today, what is the value of producing something that will not result in some kind of fame and/or fortune or is not useful to others? For an answer to this, I am inspired by the creativity of Nature and the universe at large. When I consider such wonders as birds of paradise, peafowl, cartwheel and spiral galaxies, and angelfish, I sense that beyond scientific explanations for their splendour, there must be infinity and joy in the creative impulse. Surely there must be something more than a functional or evolutionary reason for a peacock to have such an extravagant display of plumage? As humans living on Earth, we are a part of Nature and the universe, so surely it is thus in our nature to be creative and to experience sheer joy in doing so?

Yet, I also believe that if you discover and follow your passion, recognition and reward (and satisfying meaning) will naturally fall into place, which is why I say that they are not criteria for personal creativity, yet it is not excluded from the personal creative endeavour that what you create has value for, is appropriate for or useful to others.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

1 I found a summary of different definitions and theories at the California State University, Northridge site (http://www.csun.edu/~vcpsy00h/creativity/define.htm). See also ‘Creativity: An Overview’ by Mohamed Taha (http://www.mohamedtaha.net/My%20Scientific%20Works/Articles/Creativity_An%20Overview.pdf).

2 ‘… there are two kinds of creativity that we often talk about in creativity research. There’s first of all “little c creativity” which is creativity in everyday life, solving everyday problems. And that kind of creativity is very closely related to intelligence because intelligence includes, as part of it, problem-solving abilities. So creativity overlaps with intelligence when you are talking about little c creativity. But when you are talking about “big C creativity”, you’re talking about being able to generate new ideas, generate some kind of product that’s going to have some kind of impression on other people. I may be a poem, it may be a patent, it may be a short story, it may be a journal article or whatever. But it’s something that is a concrete, discrete product that is original and serves some kind of adaptive function. And that kind of creativity, that big c creativity, involves a whole bunch of other characteristics besides intelligence. It involves motivation, it involves expertise in a particular domain, it involves certain kinds of abilities in regard to imagination, free association, remote association, and so forth. So it’s a much broader construct, and much, in a sense, rarer in a population, than when we talk about something like little c creativity.’ (Dr Dean Keith Simonton, http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/simonton_interview.shtml)

3 Ronald A Beghetto and James C Kaufman (2007) ‘Toward a Broader Conception of Creativity: A Case for “mini-c” Creativity’, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol. 1, No. 2, 73–79.

4 Mark A Runco (2003) ‘Education for Creative Potential’, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, Vol. 47, No. 3, 321‑322.

© SD Vahl, 2012

SD Vahl hereby asserts her right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.