small c creativity
Welcome to the conversation.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell lists the seven-five most wealthy people in human history.
This list includes the likes of Cleopatra, William II, and Elizabeth I, together with Henry Ford, Bill Gates, and Ingvar Kamprad. (If you wonder who the last person is, any time you buy something at Ikea you are making this person wealthier!)
Gladwell then points to the unusual thing about this list of 75: 14 of them are Americans born within nine years of each other (1831-1840). What Gladwell is pointing to is a group of people who made their fortunes at a time when the American economy was transforming (which included the emerging of Wall Street). As Gladwell comments: If you were born in the late 1840s you missed it. You were too young to take advantage of that moment. If you were born in the 1820s you were too old: your mind-set was shaped by the pre-Civil War paradigm.
Armed with this information, Gladwell goes on to consider the breakthrough made in personal computing in the shape of the Altair 8800 kit, costing $397 in January 1975. He predicts the ages of those who would be best positioned to take advantage of this (I’ll let you buy the book to find out what all the predictors were) and narrows this down to a couple of years: Ideally, you want to be twenty or twenty-one, which is to say, born in 1954 or 1955; here are a few of the people and their birthdates that he identified with this computer revolution: Bill Gates (1955), Paul Allen (Microsoft: 1953), Steve Ballmer (co-founder Apple: 1956), and Bill Joy (co-founder Sun Microsystems: 1954).
Each has a story that is not only about being very talented, but also about having the right kind of background, being in the right place at the right time, and having huge amounts of preparation time under their belts (ideally, ten thousand hours).
We might be able to look back over the lives of these people, with Gladwell’s help, and see more of how they got to be successful - which is not about effortlessly succeeding, or, grinding something out without talent - but it also got me wondering just what might emerge if we looked forward through our lives, through all the things our lives have included, to see just what all of this might have been preparing us for.
Many might as if there is any point to this; they think that they have “missed the boat” or there never was a boat in the first place. But I keep wondering, what might we find? Has there been something developing in our lives towards a remarkable life, but we do not recognise this - through our childhood, our education, our work, the relationships with others, our experiences good and bad?
I am also wondering if all of this makes sense for such a time as this, that this is a time of opportunity to make a difference, a time of contributing by people like you.
I love exploring with people the extraordinary nature of their lives, their abilities and dreams wrapped around great character; within these I find myself wondering more and more about how the experiences in people’s lives have added up to something, and identifying the something is everything.
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi refers to two types of creativity: historical and personal. This is helpful. We are not thinking here of historical creativity - where our name is known by many - but we are considering personal creativity, by which we make a difference in the lives of as many as we can: But if creativity with a capital C is largely beyond our control, living a creative personal life is not. And in terms of ultimate fulfillment, the latter may be the most important accomplishment (Creativity).
What do you think?
