This is a warm day and it feels like spring here in Washington DC, unfortunately I’ve spent most of the day in a hotel (I’d love this Park Hyatt that I am staying because they have has a amazing selection of teas ).
I was pondering over a cup of darjeeling our plan for new hires in the next 12 months and how creativity is such an important hiring criteria. There are a lot of common myths and questions about the creative minds? Wonder what makes one a person creative ? Are there certain personality traits? Are there different types of creative people? Can creative people be analytical at the same time? Can creative be separated from art? Can creative people be detailed oriented? I am not giving you answers to all of these questions, at least not today.
Becoming creative is not necessarily about becoming another DaVincci or Steve Jobs. Ordinary people can find their creative side. If you lock into your own creative juices, you can become a better leader. Creativity can be as simple as new ways for old situations. So start the New Year by re-building your creative mind. Let me try to highlight some of most obvious qualities of a creative mind:
They perceive the world differently - Creative people thrive on multi-dimensional of perceiving: sensing, seeing, hearing, touching things. These different perspectives open up their minds to unlimited possibilities. Many people who don’t think that they are creative are those who are fearful of change and prefer to work within limits with limited possibilities (within a box). Creative people enjoy to see many, even infinite possibilities in most situations or challenges. This could be a problem, 80% of creative people have this weakness.
There are sensitive to even tiny little things - Being sensitive helps creativeness in many ways. It helps with awareness of problems in the first place, known & unknown, articulated or unarticulated. Sensitivity usually comes with observant. Creative people constantly are using their senses: consciously, sub-consciously and unconsciously, even non-consciously. Now this one you cannot learn, either you have it or not. Sorry.
They can handle plenty of ambiguity - Creative people needs ambiguity, not simply tolerant of ambiguity. It allows them to flourish, just like a creative person was given with boxes and boxes amount of Lego bricks in all shapes of colors and even material so they can be even molded into other non brick shapes. And there are no instructions booklet so you don’t know what you are building. They actually love to be ambiguous to challenge other people and ideas.
They can synthesize different data intuitively - They have the ability to see the whole picture, seeing emerging patterns, grasp solutions with only just a few pieces. You can be a creative spreasheet reader and that's the quality of a good invesment banking analyst. Creative knows and good at trusting their intuition, even if theyare right 51% of the time.
They never put money as no. 1 motivator - Money is never the first consideration. As important as money is in today’s world of luxuries and status, it is never a driving force for a creative person. Some say the most creative people generally have an intuitive sense of the amount of money they basically need and once that need is fulfilled then money stops affecting or driving them. This is true most of the time. 95% of creative people are like that. There are the 5% exceptions ( I have one in our company).
