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Comment by robonerd | Hacker News Reader

I believe that everybody has the capacity to be creative, and those who think they don't are impeded not by a lack of creative spark, but rather by their own inhibitions and belief that they aren't creative. Part of this is cultural; engineers are told by society that an engineer/artist schism exists and incorporate that meme into their self-image, writing off their own ability to be creative. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy because creativity is like a muscle that needs to be exercised.

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"I believe that everybody has the capacity to be creative"

Maybe, but I am almost certain that this capacity is highly unequal. Some people are like walking geysers of inspiration and you cannot suppress them culturally anymore than you can prevent the July sun from baking the sand. Others are decidedly low-voltage even when it comes to private creativity (such as decorating your own home).

It is the same with muscles. We all have some muscles, but only some people do really have the potential to be good athletes.

I think you're speaking of interest and motivation, without which you won't try to be creative or hit the gym. But I believe the capability still exists within you, even if you choose to ignore it. Nobody is unable to be an artist because of the way they were born.

I am not sure if this is distinction without difference. A part of being an artist is, for me at least, the drive to do something.

Myself, I write quite a lot (in Czech), I have published 7 books so far. I am not claiming to be a big artist, merely a mediocre one, but I notice that I don't really have a choice. I have to write something almost every day, much like a full toilet bowl has to overflow.

There is difference between motivation and aptitude.

True, but practice makes, if not perfect, at least better.

I will say this is your gift, a lot of talent people can work hard than anyone

Maybe we're all capable of being a mediocre artist but artistic genius is another thing altogether.

Pursuing art as someone of mediocre skill can be extremely fulfilling and worthwhile endeavor. Fixating over whether you are a genius is probably not.

It's not about being the best.

It is for some people and that's probably a reasonable predictor of how well they'll do. Have you met people who excel at something who don't care about excelling? I can't think of one.

Your comment reads a bit like this:

I am creative. If you are not, it is because you lack the willpower.

Funnily enough, it is the reverse expectation that is often placed. "If you can't concentrate, it's because you lack the willpower" etc.

I lived under this burden that something was wrong with me my whole life; that I had some character flaw that made me unsuccessful at things that other people find easy.

And then I was diagnosed with ADD. And then I was prescribed drugs. And then I discovered what it was like to be a normal human being. It turns out that it took just 35 milligrams of a single substance to allow me to focus just like other human beings can, and get through a normal work day like other human beings can.

The point of my story is this: people are wired differently. It is not a character flaw that someone doesn't have an attribute that you should think they have. It is not a lack of willpower or focus.

I have a highly creative brain. It is clear that there is something that causes my brain to make connections faster than most others. And, that thing also helps me make new and random connections in a way that most others will never experience.

This thing, this creative spark, is also my ADD. My brain is constantly taking me on weird and wonderful journeys. I don't choose it, it just happens. And the same thing in reverse. I don't choose to lose focus. It just happens. My brain is constantly making noise and interrupting me. It just happens.

May I ask how you know your new, medicated behavior is representative of how normal human beings think?

I don't consider myself to have ADD, but I have taken Adderall. It increased my ability to focus, focusing on tasks is rewarded in society, and I felt like the positive effects of it made me a better version of myself. I stopped because I didn't appreciate some of the negative side-effects.

It seems common for people who take stimulants to feel like they're a better version of themselves while experiencing the positive side-effects of the medication irrespective of an ADD diagnosis. If you agree, I wonder how you came to the conclusion you were at a competitive disadvantage compared to the norm rather than simply having a leg-up against the norm once medicated.

And sorry if probing is disrespectful. No ill intent here. Just idle curiosity.

Stimulants make you better than baseline on some tasks, but definitely not all of them, and not all creative ones. (Especially if you lose out on sleep or your teeth start falling out from abusing them.)

It's usually pretty obvious if you have ADD, and it's not "you're bad at your job", it's more like "everything outside your job is falling apart". Your job provides enough stress to concentrate on it most of the time.

Adderall also doesn't make you "more stimulated" like caffeine does - a regular psychiatric dose should make you a little calmer, since your life isn't falling apart anymore.

'I wonder how you came to the conclusion you were at a competitive disadvantage compared to the norm'

Happy to answer. I've been fired four times, and have only narrowly avoided being fired a few other times. The only reason they didn't fire me in those circumstances was I had managers who didn't have the heart to let me go.

I nearly lost my marriage partly due to my undiagnosed ADD.

There is a look in people's eyes when they have utterly given up on you; when they just cannot comprehend how someone can be so incompetent at basic tasks and unable to function, yet so good at high level tasks. I've seen that look too many times.

Initially, they would love me for the creativity and strategic thinking. But then after causing fire after fire after fire through the most trivial errors from lack of concentration, you slowly, slowly see them lose faith in you.

I could go on, but you get me.

Obviously I can't know how a 'normie' sees and feels, but when I take my drug, all of a sudden I can sit down and work all day like my wife and (most of my) colleagues can, rather than being in a constant state of distraction-resistance.

With drugs, my ratio of good days to bad days has completely changed. I'm 37 years old and this is the first time I've ever gotten 18 months into a job and been in a situation where everyone still thinks I'm doing great. Normally by this time I'm getting the wooden stares.

> But I believe the capability still exists within you

Maybe, but the thing about creative people is they create. Creativity isn't about potential, it's about an objective act of making something new.

Like with any other skill, I'd imagine most people could probably become "good at" being creative with practice. The very best creatives would be those who practiced and who had natural talent, but surely the ceiling is rather high even for those without much natural creativity.

Ideating is a muscle. When you intentionally spend time everyday writing down ideas, playing with old ideas, and looking at how others drew inspiration for their ideas, you become stronger at the skill. "Creative" people were not hindered by the fact that their early ideas were stupid, pointless and derivative. They kept at it.

>New study shows highly creative people’s brains work differently from others'

Ya think?

>"I believe that everybody has the capacity to be creative"

This has to be put in perspective.

Those are not the subjects they were trying to focus on in this study.

I think everybody has some kind of outstanding ability, and certain types of creativity are just one of the very rare things, it turns out.

>only some people do really have the potential to be good athletes.

This is a good example and it can still be worthwhile for each of us to improve ourselves anyway.

As someone who is in the 'geyser' category, I'll split the difference. Much of what determines how creatively one feels about oneself depends on how they themselves define it. Often the lens is some musical/artistic pursuit where the measurement is somewhat arbitrarily tied to someone(s) famous, which can produce a bad relative sense of self.

I have friends who artistically really have fairly mundane tendencies, but as chefs/cooks, mechanical tinkerers, etc they have all manner of (insert proper cliche here, a la "out of box") creative thinking.

But often they don't see those skills as "creative" so the domain parameters and how they are expressly defined matters a lot.

Probably true, but as the article suggests, it may be more than just exercise. Some people seem to be given a creative brain from the get-go, whilst others must work very hard to produce creative outcomes, and indeed...may stop trying altogether because of this.

If I take the least creative people in my circles, one pattern I can spot is that they lack curiosity. Interests are narrow, shallow and for pragmatic reasons only. Not ignorant, just cognitively passive. My pseudo-scientific take on creativity is that it's connecting dots in unforeseen ways. Without curiosity though, there's little to connect.

I’m right there with you. I thought I wasn’t creative. The magic insight was that you just start doing the thing and creativity comes as part of the process.

Don’t know how to start? Just start and the process automatically becomes breaking down the task into thousands of tiny parts that you then just do.

A CS centric way of looking at this is that spending (brain) cycles exploring the problem is a necessary but not sufficient condition to solve it.

Most people don’t believe they can and don’t even try. But the brain is very fascinating and imo anyone is capable of problem solving.

One practical reason I am really sold on diversity in Tech is that I believe peoples experiences shape the way they think about problems. Having different kinds of minds looking at the same problem can result in different solutions. And that’s amazing. We can’t predict how it will work in advance, all we can do is create the right conditions which precipitate this result.

> the process automatically becomes breaking down the task into thousands of tiny parts

One way I categorise artists I have met is engineer-type artists versus discovery-type artists.

* engineer-type artists: definite goal. The artist has a defined goal in mind for a piece of art, they plan towards achieving that goal, and they produce their artwork. Learning and creativity within some of the steps.

* discovery-type artists: no defined goal. There is a huge mount of play and seemingly random experimentation with their medium, almost searching for random discovery. Often playing within a chosen restricted domain. They might say something like “the work discovered itself as I did it”.

I am an engineer at heart, so I have really appreciated learning how discovery-type artists create. Disclaimer: not an artist.

I liked your two categories, they make sense to me.

As a discovery-type it is sometimes really difficult to work with other people!

I find this distinction to match my experience with musicians (qualification: I produce records).

I lean more towards this engineer mindset, but know plenty of artists who just dive right in and start molding and hacking away. One of the big takeaways that I've gotten from observing them is the importance of just starting. Even if I don't know where I'm headed. If I persist in generating bad ideas I will eventually fall into a creative groove that is rewarding. It might take an hour or more to arrive there, but it happens.

The composer Carla Bley summed up the importance of her daily work routine succinctly in an essay: "If the muse strikes when you're in the kitchen, the best you're going to get is a sandwich."

I believe I also say this sentiment described a while ago in a long-forgotten HN essay. The writer referred to it as AIC: Ass-in-chair methodology. Just sit down and start working.

This could be my neurological development being slightly askew, but I am not creative in the slightest. I used to think I was somewhat creative (I drew constantly as a child and into my late teens, played a lot of music, worked as a graphic designer, love building things from wood, sort of a “maker” of sorts these days), but then I realized I’m just a regurgitation machine.

I’m not sure I’ve had a remotely original or interesting idea of my own in my life.

I just suck up everything around me, rip it apart, slap it back together, and that’s my version of “creativity”.

I’ve been working at being more creative now that I’ve realized I’m not creative, and I have no idea how. I am a pattern replicating machine.

I’m a little disappointed, but also somewhat content that I can enjoy what I do nonetheless. It’s all a sort of meditation and practice in developing skills. I’m not sure I ever prided myself on being creative in the first place, so it’s not a loss I suppose.

But when you say anyone can be creative, I have no idea what you mean. I can’t figure it out. Everything I think of is something someone has done. I can trace everything back to someone else. There is nothing creative about it.

What I find funny is that the description of your version of "creativity" is my general definition of creativity. Has anyone ever done anything completely original and unheard of before? I think to be creative at something is to have a large mental library of concepts within a certain space, and to be able to mix and match those concepts. Much like ripping ideas apart and slapping them back together as you say.

I used to think visual character design was the hardest thing ever. To just come up with something out of nowhere. that being creative like that was a very difficult thing. What I didn't usually see or look at is all the designs those people have seen and taken inspiration from before.

I think that's also why some ideas can be "ahead of their time". Someone made a connection between some concepts that many people haven't yet, and will think is too farfetched. Still, over time people can come to see value in that idea that was dismissed earlier.

Just to reiterate my main point, I think it's easy to look at what other people do and think "Wow, how original!", without ever seeing their inspiration for something. Even though they might just feel like they replicated some patterns.

You're too hard on yourself, the reality is that this is the vast majority of people. There are those few percent of people that will come up with something new, but the majority of time its a person thinking about combining A with B, and coming up with something that's just slightly new.

It also quite depends on environment. When you try to think about something, the observer may think that you are just being lazy and doing nothing. I can't count how many times I've been told by parents or other people that used to be close that I should do some work rather than just sit and stare at the wall. And I would have some really great ideas of how to make something or how to solve something. Then those people would say - you are just stupid, you can't do this and that. I can imagine many people will try to shun such thoughts and associate it with something unpleasant. As I did for many years. This may sound brutal, but only when I cut contact with every single person that was negatively affecting my creativity in the past and present I stopped being depressed (not completely, sometimes it's coming back), but also started getting successes at work and eventually I was able to start doing things on my own. Some people don't realise how toxic they are and there isn't even point talking to them about that, because you are going to get ridiculed and attacked.

For sure. I have a bachelor's in Fine Arts but taught myself to code. I think the pendulum has swung too far, I need to get back to painting/drawing and exercise that muscle again :)

Make demos ;)

I am talking about the demoscene here.

I have an engineering degree and work in tech. I've also been part of more than 30 exhibitions around the world.

Creating a new web app side project and an art project in whatever medium is exactly the same type of creative work.

However, being somebody working inside a large institution, whether tech or art, is not creative because you are limited by the org what you can say do and in practice even think. You cannot be creative there.

So the environment either permits you or restricts you from being creative. You need to breakout and create your own environment to be creative in.

And, once you become an established artist you have certain rules to follow so you can no longer be as creative as when you started out.

> I believe that everybody has the capacity to be creative

I like your optimism but it isn't my experience. Creative people can't help but be creative. They need no prompting, no encouragement, no practice etc. They just do it. I personally need to create things and feel like I am missing something or wasting my life if I am not busy with projects. Most people I know aren't like that at all.

Sometimes you need to see all the available tools. Replace the "talent" with a little "technique".

Cannot draw 3D with perspective? Use isometric-ish projection with graded axes.

Cannot do music? Learn music theory, some scales and so on.Maybe an easier instrument.

Of course it will not replace a person with natural talents, but it can help to overcome those beliefs.

To me it’s a matter of investing time to learn an art medium. Painting, playing music, or writing code, all require some painful hours/days/weeks/months of learning before you can actually use the medium to “create”. Most people don’t get past that learning phase, and thus can never really have fun creating.

I believe everybody has the capacity to be a LOT of different things but money means many/most are lead down a path of drudgery.

Like the TarSnap guy, first you have to be free. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981486

Wouldn't that be a rather unique human trait not following the normal probability distribution?

Yeah I agree with this, most of the people I know that aren’t creative seem to have some emotional block or belief that it’s not their role. Often if you get past that they are incredibly creative

Creative is a very fuzzy word. For example, why is someone who produces works of art considered “creative”, but someone who creates - for example bridges - an engineer?

That might be much more true for children. Definitely not the vast majority of adults.

"I'm not a math person"

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