Stephen Shapiro argues creativity is inspiration, not innovation, and shows how it drops from 98% of five-year-olds to 2% of adults. He blames schooling for narrowing focus and shares practices like beach walks and journaling to recover what we had as kids.
Questions this video answers
98%
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12%
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200,000 adults
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The other day I attended a small group session on creativity. Less than a dozen people in the room from all walks of life. Most of them weren't even from the world of business. The facilitator asked the question, what is creativity? I decided to sit back and see what others would say. And I heard the types of responses that I would typically hear if I asked that question. The corporations, for example, it's about new ideas, it's about novelty, it's about doing something different, doing something better, maybe problem solving. And I really took a hard look for myself and I decided that for me, creativity at its core, at the essence of what it is to be a creative human being, is about inspiration. And I purposefully chose that word inspiration because it comes from the word spirit and it technically means to breathe life into something. And to me, that's what creativity is about. It is not so much the same as innovation, which is a purposeful act of creating something that ultimately will generate value. But creativity is about tapping into our spirit. It's about tapping into something deep inside of us. You know, there are numerous studies that have looked at creativity levels as we get older. For example, one claims that 98% of five year old kids test as highly creative. 98%. And then by the time they get to 10 years old, it is down to 30%. When they're 15, it's down to 12%. And the study also showed that 200,000 adults over the age of 25, only 2, 2% of them tested as highly creative. And I'm convinced that it was the 2% that didn't test as highly creative when they were 5 years old and they went through some kind of metamorphosis through their life. The point is, we are inherently as human beings, creative. We have it inside of us. It's how we are wired. But as time goes on, we learn a lot of things to fit in. We go to school at the age of five, we, we're taught to regurgitate facts. We go to university. Instead of gathering and being inspired, we start to focus and narrow and dig deep. I think the opportunity for all human beings is to tap into that spirit, to tap into that creative part of us, that inspiration. And it's not so much necessarily as an individual about what it achieves, but maybe what it does for us as a human being. What does that creativity do for us? So ask yourself, what are the things that you could do to tap into your creativity on a regular basis? For me, I love to go walk on the beach. That for me is my biggest source of great ideas or I love to sit in a hot tub as often as I can, which isn't very often. Maybe take a hot bath sometimes it's as simple as just quieting my mind or journaling. It is important I think for every individual no matter who you are to tap into that innate creative spirit that you have. This will be used in so many different ways not just in terms of achieving things in life but generating passion, creating excitement. It is to me the source of everything else that we do and will help us be more alive when we're doing our more left brain work, our more analytical work. And to me this is an important thing for everyone to do and I encourage you to find something that you can do every day on a regular basis that will help you tap into your creativity, tap into your inspiration, tap into what it is for you as a human being to be alive.
