Tyler's Blog - Trying to understand creativity

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Trying to understand creativity

I think that the most valuable talent someone can have is creativity. It seems like you can succeed in just about any field as long as you're always trying to think of things in ways that others haven't.

If you lack experience, creativity allows you to think in ways that insiders can't. If you aren't as technically skilled or as smart as you need to be, creativity helps you come up with unconventional solutions that don't require the technical chops.

Naturally, I want to spend as much time as I can working on projects that exercise my creative side. I can't learn to be creative from a book, but the more I put myself in a position where I need to be resourceful, the more comfortable I'll be in similar situations when they arise in the future.

With that in mind, I set out to decide what I think creativity is. I'm not talking about LSD induced techno songs. I want something a little more applicable to problems that I see at work and in life. Here are the two things that I think are critical to a creative thought process:

The ability to envision and discuss something that does not exist.
The ability to think in a way that isn't constrained by your previous thoughts.

Most people probably wouldn't think of #1 as creativity, but I really think it's the most important part. Innovation and crazy ideas always get the spotlight, but you can't even get to that point unless you have a mental model of something. By definition, you can't think of something new if it already exists. Similarly, it's not very efficient to only think one step ahead of implementation. A good marketer can understand an entire marketing campaign without having anything physical to look at.

#2 is more traditional, but I want to be clear that I'm not necessarily talking about having new ideas. Creativity often just means combining old ideas in new ways. I previously mentioned how easy it is to follow convention, but sometimes combining two generally unrelated concepts can create an amazing idea. The important thing is that you don't just assume that whatever you did in the past is the right thing to do in the present.

So I need to get myself involved in as many projects as possible that test me in these two areas. The best way to get practice with #1 is to design a database before a massive project. Before big projects, Ben (the CTO at Zane Benefits) and I sit down and just talk about what the back-end should look like. After many hours, we can talk about it as if the entire thing is built. If you had us both build the software in parallel, we'd end up with very similar results. It's awesome how real the project seems even though it's just an idea in our heads.

As for #2, I think UI design is my best bet. It seems like a waste of time when I'm doing it, but if I spend an hour prototyping every page I make in fireworks before writing a line of code, the results are easily worth it. My old approach was to just start coding and figure it out as I go. The problem is that it's easy to make a page that's good enough. I enjoy the challenge of taking "good enough" and tweaking things until you couldn't even recognize the page anymore.

I'll try to remind myself of this post at least once a week. I need to focus on this stuff.

Posted by Tyler King

Tags: Ideas, Creativity

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Hi, I'm Tyler King and this is my blog. It's about programming, graphic design, UI design, and anything else related to software development. You can read this post to learn a little bit more about what I'm trying to do here.

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