crea**vity
Welcome to the conversation.
Crea**vity.
David Bayles and Ted Orland explain why they don’t include the word CREATIVITY in their book Art and Fear in the following note: Readers may wish to note that nowhere in this book does the dreaded C-word appear. Why should it? Do only some people have ideas, confront problems, dream, live in the real world and breathe air?
They leave it out for the same reason I keep putting it in. Every human is made to be creative: that’s my belief and that’s my hope. A belief because to be human is to be creative, and hope because I want as many as possible to find this out.
Just as I finished reading Art and Fear I began reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (highly recommended after just reading the first 70 pages). Gladwell begins to unpack the different reasons behind people being successful. What he discovers is that there’s a lot more to it than talent. One survey of musicians discovered, amongst many other things, that no one effortlessly succeeded on talent alone and no one succeeding by grinding there way to the top without any talent. What they found was that it has a lot to do with preparation - indeed 10,000 hours of it (roughly ten years) of preparing and practicing a talent.
I will write more about this soon, but the thing that Gladwell began to uncover was that some have the right kind of encouragement and others don’t; this might make all the difference in some having the opportunity of putting in the many hours and others not having these. He offers the examples of the Beetles - recognised my many to have been a phenomenal talent. What people don’t see is how they just happened to be the youngsters in Liverpool, a city with a certain connection to Hamburg, to travel to Germany between 1960-62 (they’d already been together for three years by 1960) to play an estimated 1,200 performances, the shortest of which was five hours long. They soon had to expand their repertoire to cover others and include jazz. They came back with a huge amount of preparation behind them.
Everybody has talent but not everyone has the same opportunity or encouragement to develop their talent.
Let me know what you think.
