Creativity: Between Skill and Talent.

Is creativity a skill or a talent? Is it something you acquire, or is it something that you’re born with? And does it really matter to know whether it’s a skill or a talent? I mean what difference does it make.

Well, the last thing first, it matters. And it makes a huge difference in what to expect from ourselves.

Generally, people like to believe that a conspiracy is causing them to fail, rather than their own wrong decisions or lack of effort. Because the message behind them is different. While one means you have done everything you could, and done it right, but there’s an external force stopping you from succeeding. The later means you need to work on yourself and make some necessary improvement to succeed.

The first one is very appealing because it hides the flaws in our actions that we don’t like to admit. The second highlight the fact that it’s us who need to do more work.

The first tells us that we are successful, although we’re not, to the point of which people conspire to make us fail.

If your job is to do creative work, but you don’t seem to be successful there are two possible reasons;

1. you are simply not talented.

2. you need to do work on your skills.

The first one gives you a feeling that there’s an external force stopping you from being creative, it could be a divine force that didn’t grant you the talent.

The second one tells you that you can be creative if you pushed yourself a little more.

Both reasons have a high impact on how are going to respond, one could cause you to quit while the other could be a fuel for resilience.

The problem is that most of the time we are not aware of which scenario we believe in. It’s buried deep inside, and we react based on it subconsciously.

So, acknowledging the difference even if subtle does matter.

And to answer the question of whether creativity is a skill or a talent, we need to know first what makes skill a skill and talent a talent, and what is creativity in the first place.

On a fundamental level:

• A talent is something you are born with a gift from the divine that makes you perform better than others at a given task.

• A skill is something that can be acquired through learning and practice.

The definition of creativity, however, is quite vague. Everyone seems to have a different definition but the definition, made by Stefan Mumaw, perfectly described it as: “Creativity is problem-solving with relevance and novelty. Relevance: the degree by which a problem is, actually, solved. Novelty: the degree of uniqueness or originality a solution possesses.”

Breaking down this definition you could be naturally talented at problem analyzing and processing information making you a talented problem solver but that doesn’t mean you are creative, same with every part you could have a quirky brain the comes up with novel ideas but you can’t address the problem you are trying to solve and that doesn’t make you creative.

But also, you can be talented at both.

So, is it a talent?

Not really, because talent can be polished and improved with practice how can you practice creativity? And if it can be practised, that means it can be learnt. And if it can be learnt, that leads us to the possibility that it could be a skill.

Then, it’s a skill!

Not really, you see, you can be skilled while someone else is talented at the same exact thing. That makes creativity skill and talent at the same time.

But I didn’t bring you all the way here to tell you this, did I?

We’ve been exposed to the idea that talents and skills are two different things, while they both mean the same thing (the ability to do something) but the difference is in the amount of effort we need to spend.

If someone is talented, that means he can do something effortlessly. But when he is not talented, he needs to do more effort to reach the same level of effortlessness while doing the same task.

But we took for granted the phrase “we are not talented” as a sign that we are unable to do something, rather than taking it as a sign for the extra effort we need to make.

So, what is really stopping us from being creative is our mindset, we believe that creativity is something one ‘s born with we believe that we, no matter how hard we try, won’t be creative.

That brings to a valid question how can one practise creativity?

Because creativity happens inside our brains by forming a neural connection, there are no proven guidelines for practising creativity because everybody’s brain is different. However, there are some proven habits and techniques that contribute to creativity and could help improve it. I’ll talk about them on the next blog.