Being Creative – The Art And The Craft

Almost everyone in the corporate world think creativity is the domain of some ‘different’ people – less scientific, more artsy, long-haired and preferably wearing a diamond stud in the ear – a person who would rather write a poem about a flower (or paint it) than dissect it for its internal anatomy. There is something fuzzy and romantic about creativity. Something not open to analysis or the notion of learning, which makes it attractive.

So let us try the difficult task – let us dissect the creative process to see if we can understand creativity and bring it into our work.

It looks like there are two component strengths to anybody who has ever been successfully labelled creative. Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs or Amir Khan – they all practise both art and a craft in their chosen areas and they perform it better than most.

The art is in the muscle of the mind – an idea that sits at a unique intersection of novelty, timeliness and universality, and comes from the mind of the creative persona. How he gets it (how does the electrical machinery of the brain, all those neurons, conspire to trap that new combination) is considered a black art. The creative persons themselves sometimes don’t know how it happens. But they do know that they let themselves be open to its coming. They can train the muscle of the mind to focus and defocus, open the door for the mind to slip into something and then shut it to trap the idea. They say most often that the most creative moment is when they are not blinded by the thinking and the doing mind.

So there is this act of sitting down, focusing on your subject and putting aside your body of knowledge of the subject and letting go of the thinking mind. Some people go to sleep and wake up with that new idea. Some walk away and come back with it. Some catch it in their bath. Whatever helps, helps! Catch it! Let the coconut of ours wallow in the innumerable connections that may or may not fire, but let it be alert for that something magical, something that shifts, something ‘aha’ – which we hold and scramble to express.

And that’s where the craft steps in. The craft is more in the muscle of the body. The idea captures the form of an emotion and the emotion moves the body and then the body takes the specific actions needed to express the captured idea.

For the writer, it may be the expression of that idea in a document written by hand or on the PC, early in the morning when the world is still slumbering. For the designer, it may be the creation of a schematic on a sheet of paper. For the scientist, it may be a scramble to jot down the notation for the idea. As they express, their styles step in. For every expression of the idea bears the hallmark of the personal style of a person. That is why poems on the same topic or paintings based on the same theme or products that do the same thing would all look different. They bear the bias and the expertise that is so personal to the creator – his years of knowledge, experience and muscle memory combined in a new and exciting way that is his own.

The craft looks easier to pick up, but that can be deceiving. The craft needs tools and the craft needs practice with those tools. It requires countless hours of working to develop one’s own style – be it in writing, painting, designing, acting, experimenting or analysing data. It is a long walk to express something as intangible as an idea into something tangible for the world to know. The tools need mastery; the expression needs honing and the knowledge needs to be up to date. And then you need luck to make a success out of it.

But hopefully, at the end, it is worth it all – the fusion of the art and the craft giving you the personal and exquisite joy of creating something new. A new push to the universe.

Go, create!

About the author: Rupesh is a typical corporate honcho who also loves design, innovation and management. He has worked across India, Europe, China and the US for 15 years.