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Comment by dsirijus | Hacker News Reader

Often, people confuse swirling ideas seeking form in their head for creativity.

I think the other situation is more common: smart people with swirling unique thoughts keep them hidden because they don't consider themselves creative.

I'm yet to meet such a person. Probably it's just uncommon in the IT crowd, which is highly open to ideas and meritocratic.

How do you know that you've never met a person who didn't share their ideas with you?

I haven't met a person who would be visibly shy to share his ideas with others when I already knew about these. This is of course a skewed sample.

I agree completely. When I was in Art school I was working on a project that instead of using charcoal to create the darks on a white sheet of paper, the assignment was to use a white conte crayon to denote the light areas on a black sheet of paper. I had taken my assignment home and was working on it in my living room when a neighbor and friend of mine knocked on my door and he came in and looked at what I was doing. He was a Mech. E student, and a damn smart person. He told me to my face that he could never do what I was doing because he wasn't creative.

"Creative" doesn't just apply to visual arts - it's a thinking style. And every human, ever, is creative - just in different avenues. And those avenues are all obtainable by all people.

Today "creative" usually refers to originality, not the act of creation. It's no worse than using "engineer" to mean computer programmer rather than someone who works on something with an engine.

Well, if we're getting our etymology on, 'engine' originally referred to any trick, device, or machine. An engineer was someone who created engines. It only took on the association with steam locomotives in the 1800s.

I would also like point out that early computers were also known as analytic engines.

there are lots of smart people with good ideas. there are very few smart people with good ideas who have MADE SOMETHING based on one of those ideas.

Actually making things - finished things - is the hard part. For one, almost anything worth creating involves substantial schlep, and people lack the patience for the schlep. For another, creative people continually have new ideas, and it's very easy to drop that boring schlep in favor of the shiny new idea.

I know a ton of wonderfully creative minds, full of great ideas, that have never accomplished anything. They never finish, either due to frustration with the schlep, or by starting something new before they ever finish what they were working on. Those people are NOT good creative partners, generally. They'll flake out when the going gets tough - and if what you're doing is interesting enough to be worthwhile, it WILL get tough at some point.

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