this is me aged 12 not very good at Art hated writing and avoided music. This Is Me aged 18 studying math economics and geography at school and about to go to university to do accounting and finance. this is me age 28 me now technically a professional creative who also has a YouTube channel. so what the f happened there. well while for most of my life I thought I wasn't a creative person turns out I am and having realized that I actually think everyone's a creative person. to prove it I identified all the myths I used to believe that stopped me from being a creative person reaching my creative potential and debunked them. so if you'd asked accounting of Finance Jay why he wasn't creative he'd probably say something along the lines of I just wasn't born creative which sounds fair enough. some people aren't born natural athletes or natural communicators so surely some aren't born natural creatives right. well I used to think that until I stumbled on a TED Talk by a chap called George land explaining what happened when a

government agency asked him for a favor. Somebody from NASA came to us, the deputy director, and said, Look, we have a lot of people working for us. We need some way to select the people that are the most creative so they can go on the teams that are facing the toughest problems. Can you give us some kind of an instrument, a test, or something that we can give to find those people? The test George and his team came up with was fairly simple. Say I showed you this object and asked you to come up with as many uses for it as possible. How many could you come up with? 4, 8, 12? Well, it turns out how many ideas you can come up with in response to a specific stimuli is a pretty effective way of measuring creativity, and George decided to take it one step further. He decided to test a bunch of 5-year-olds, over 1,000 of them, to see how they scored. 98% of them fell into the genius level of creativity. The results were so surprising to him that he decided to

extend the study even further retesting the same kids in 5 years time. But this time the total had fallen to 30%. So he retested them again 5 years later, and it had fallen to 12%. Since then, he's tested over 1 million adults and found that only 2% of them fall into this genius level category according to this test. As kids, 98% of us are creative geniuses, yet by the time we grow up, only 2% of us are. So what's going on? Well, apparently there are two ways of thinking: divergent, which you can think of as imagination, and convergent, which you can think of as judgment. As 5-year-olds, we're all divergent thinkers, which allows us to be so creative. But then we go to school. It's fair to say our education system is outdated, built for another time. It prioritizes subjects for an industrial world and teaches us to avoid mistakes at all costs. In other words, we're taught to become convergent thinkers, meaning we

start to judge our imagination, and that just isn't how creativity works. Turns out when Pablo Picasso said, Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain one as we grow up, he was spot on. And we do it by finding our inner 5-year-old, someone who is happy to let their imagination run wild without judgment, without fear of failure, without overthinking, because that's the only way to be creative, and everyone can do it. They just have to let themselves. Thinking of 5-year-old Jay, I do always remember art class at school. You'd get your apron on, be given your paint tray, go and pick your colors, and just paint whatever the [ __ ] you wanted to. And I enjoyed it. For me, it was better than reading. But I do always remember looking around and thinking, Everyone else is better at this than me. What's going on here? Now, that might not seem like a big deal. I just wasn't that good at painting. It wasn't my thing. But as a young kid, I think it had a pretty

big impact. I tried painting and maybe a couple of the other Arts at school, but because none of them were for me, I stopped looking, and that's a problem. I think we have a very limited view of creativity. Yes, if I said, Imagine a creative person, your first thought would probably be of an artist sitting next to an easel or a writer surrounded by scrunched up pieces of paper, but they aren't the only forms of creativity. Ever heard of the Michelangelo of Microsoft Excel? Yeah, that's right. He makes Incredible art in Microsoft XL, absolutely unbelievable. But even outside of the Arts, I think Steve Jobs is creative. His art was just Building Products. Cristiano Ronaldo is creative. His art was just football. Albert Einstein is creative. His art was just physics. Ultimately, creativity is just combining things, doing things in a Noel way, but you need an outlet to do it. For me, I was 13 years old when I stumbled on a trick shot montage by Face Clan and was introduced to the wonderful world of YouTube and making stuff on the internet.

for the first time, I found an outlet that resonated with me. And look, I'm not saying school should have let me Smash Call of Duty and make trick shot montages, but it's an important reminder to anyone who doesn't consider themselves creative, who doesn't think there's a creative outlet for them: you just haven't found it yet, and you've got to keep looking because I guarantee there'll be one out there for you. Okay, so let's say it's 2004, and I want to become a successful journalist. I would probably need to spend at least three years getting the relevant qualifications, hope to land a job at one of the big Publications, and then fight my way up the corporate ladder to get anywhere near where I wanted to be. Now I could just start a Twitter account, and while I think that's incredible, it has its problems because your Tweet, your YouTube video, your TikTok could technically compete with the biggest creators on the platform. There's almost this expectation that it should, but unfortunately, that's just not

how it works. Ed Sheeran has a really good analogy for this. You view it as a dirty tap. When you switch a dirty tap on, it's going to flow [ __ ] water out for a substantial amount of time, and then clean water's going to start flowing. And now and then, you'll get a bit of [ __ ], but as long as it gets out of you, it's fine. As beginners, there's a lot of dirty water that's got to come out, like years' worth of dirty water. And even when you've flushed it all out, it can often take a while for other people to realize it. J.K. Rowling was turned down by 12 publishers for her first Harry Potter book, and that's just the way it goes. You've got to be okay with that. It's going to take time, but you also have to be careful what you wish for. These unrealistic expectations that the internet is creative can also cause what I like to call the ambition trap. Now, this is a bit rich coming from me because I'm here.

with ambitions to build this channel into something big. Something I can do full time. But it's interesting how rare it is to find someone who's uploading to YouTube or making something on the Internet because they can, with no ambitions to change the world or do it full time, or be part of some bigger plan. There's nothing wrong with having big dreams and wanting to turn your creativity into a full-time thing, but it doesn't always have to be. Not everyone that goes on a run is trying to break a world record or become a professional athlete or run a marathon. Some people just like running, and the same should go for creativity. It's something I really need to work on, and it might not be with this YouTube channel, but another creative endeavor, because if everyone sees this extreme success as mandatory to be creative, the only reason they'd ever actually make something, then I can see why most of them don't. This is a seriously competitive game, and ultimately most won't make it, but that shouldn't stop you from being

creative. So firstly, let's say you dial back the ambition and are creating something entirely for yourself. Some might think that's a selfish act, a luxury you can only afford in your retirement when you've done the things you need to do and can finally sit down to create whatever it is you've always dreamed of creating. Wrong. People don't see going to the gym as a luxury. Even those that don't do it know they probably should be doing it. And I think creativity should be seen in the same light. Seen as the gym for your mind. Get your 10,000 steps in for your body and your 30 minutes of creativity in for your mind. That's not selfish, that's smart. And secondly, let's say you're an ambitious weirdo and still want your creativity to change the world. Some might think that's a pointless act, something that isn't going to make a difference, something that the world doesn't need. Also wrong. If you look around, all of the great things humans have made are a product of creativity.

someone saw something wrong with the world or something they thought needed making, and they did it. And that will never change. The world will always need it, arguably now more than ever, so you may as well give it a shot. And with all of that being said, if I could go back in time and speak to uncreative J, I'd say this: firstly, people will tell you not to grow your hair out, don't listen to them. But secondly, while you might not think you're creative, you are. You've just got to keep looking, you'll find it, and when you do, keep it fun and go for it.

I debunked the “I’m not creative” myth

I debunked the “I’m not creative” myth

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