You may be reading this probably only because of the title. Or perhaps you’re here because you’ve been inspired by a new idea; you think about it often, you protect it like it’s gold —afraid of sharing it because someone could steal it from you…
The artist Chuck Close said, “Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work.” Smart man.
Anybody can have one good idea. And everything’s been done. That, you’ve probably heard of before. If it’s not the truth, it’s indubitably close to it.
Creative, innovative people don’t magically come up with new concepts; they observe the world around them and connect the dots. Then they make things happen with blood, sweat, and tears. And intelligence. Let us not forget intelligence.
Innovation: “the obvious made clear”. It was a child who told me that more than two and a half decades ago. Creativity and innovation are dependent on basic logic. Innovation is the ability to continuously take logical conclusions and assemble them into something that solves a problem better than before.
No magic.
Having ideas is easy; development is hard. That’s why so few people do it. Everyone wants to get paid for just having the idea.
But an idea is nothing without someone to develop it into something. Creativity in someone’s head is useless. Talking about creativity is equally useless. From experience, the ones who talk creativity the most are often the ones who are least likely make anything actually happen.
When an idea is developed enough and put into practice to concretely solve a problem in the tangible world, then we’re getting somewhere. We need to stop patting ourselves on the back just because we have an idea. Monkeys also have ideas; they just don’t know how to tell us.
Because when we talk about things like creativity, we are talking about how a mind works—not the random happening upon one good idea.
But then, perhaps what is most important is not whether you are a creative genius, but whether or not what you do furthers something: art, the human race, the environment it lives in.
Without that—your idea is useless. And I say that with the best of intentions.
This post was last modified on May 14, 2024 8:32 pm