Creativity is perhaps one of the things we miss the most from our childhood, when we played with an idea and everything around us was fascinatingly flexible and adapted to our way of understanding the world. Every day of being a kid is an opportunity to create, discover, invent, adapt and take away everything that happens in our heads.
The anecdotes about what children are capable of doing with their imagination are endless, often funny, and many others incredible, since they represent true solutions to situations that from our “adult” perspective we are incapable of seeing. In summary: Creativity is a treasure, which in adult life would do us a lot of good.
But, why if it is a quality so valued among the Mr.`s and Mrs.`s, creativity becomes so scarce as we grow up? There are many answers to this, and all of them theoretical-scientific-psychological; all correct. But to summarize, basically what happens is that creativity does not disappear, we take care of muting it, in many cases even suppressing it.
Creativity turns off or we turn it off?
Have you heard the saying that school kills creativity? Well that’s where it goes, and although it’s not about looking for the culprits of our lost dreams, this idea exemplifies very clearly why creativity gets tired of us as we grow.
According to Ken Robinson, a renowned theoretician expert in the development of creativity, the reason why we stop being creative as we grow up is simple: “Children take risks, improvise, they are not afraid of making mistakes; It is not that being wrong is the same as being creative, but it is clear that you cannot innovate if you are not willing to be wrong. And we adults penalize mistakes, we stigmatize them at school and in education, this is how children distance themselves from their creative abilities”.
Very clear, right? Ken Robinson did a lot of research on it, in fact he has a Ted Talk full of “Dr. Fraiser Crane”, but despite everything, it is very interesting, you can see it here:
VIDEO
But, can we adults be creative? Or we are condemned to have uninteresting ideas. How much is creativity worth to a company?