Is creativity over-rated?

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It’s a strange thing that many years ago creativity was looked down upon. Creative types were seen as weird. Even something wrong with them.

If you were a musician you couldn’t walk down the road with your gitaur slung over your shoulder. Or walk with your easle down the the road. Snickers even shunning.

In the rough and tumble days of business in the go-go eighties, creativity wasn’t appreciated. Until people like Steve Jobs came around and started to change things in the computer world.

Comic books were seen as a entertainment for the young. But don’t underestimate the creativity and imagination that goes into one issue of an average size 22-page comic book. The penciller alone will have to come up with, for example, four or five panels per page, drawing from the imagination (and with a style book). This means producing more than 100 images for one issue. Imagine that.

Stan Lee produced them quickly outlining the story and then getting the team to produce the comic. In recent times, the Marvel stable has been the inspiration and source behind many successful feature films. I watched the Men in Black movie on Saturday night and was amazed at how imaginative the film was.

Today there is more attention on creativity not for creativity’s sake but for everything from services, restaurant concepts, products and how businesses operate – via cloud services and apps that increase productivity. Schools are encouraging creative thinking to cope with the ever changing technology in the modern world.

Creative thinking is reuqired when things change. You might have change in your business. Things could have changed in your personal life. Many people these days are let go from companies and if they can’t find another job, they have to come up with something they can do themselves to create an income.

At these times, your creativity is stretched. You’ll have to rely on your network of contacts, leverage your assets, and find the emotional strength inside of you to reconceptualise or redesign your life.

Of course, creativity can go so far.You need resources, professional advice and determination. But your imagination, your ability to rethink and re-envisage a situation, can help you re-adapt and renew and put your life on a new track.

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