How to live a meaningful life: Express your creativity

One of the things that makes us uniquely human is our ability and desire to create. In this post in this series on how to live a meaningful life, I want to take a look at the numerous forms that creativity can take.

Many people have a limited picture of what creativity means, confining it to some kind of artistic expression. But just like intelligence, there are many flavors of the creativity we might feel called to.

This post is far from the final word on creativity. In fact, it’s really just the tip of a toe in the water. If any of the varieties I mention below resonate with you, I encourage you to start exploring it more.

It might be the trailhead from which you’ll embark on a whole new adventure in your career. Or it might simply be one of the colors on your palette as you identify more small-scale opportunities to experience that creativity in your day-to-day life.

Some types of creativity to consider include:

Artistic creativity

Loosely coming under the heading of The Arts, these avenues for creative expression include visual arts, like painting, or sculpture, and other arts, like music, dance, or writing.

Innovation

When you innovate, you’re creating something new. There are a bazillion avenues for innovation, from new products, to new systems, to know approaches to getting things done.

Ideas and concepts

Creativity can show up in the intangible realm of ideas and concepts. You’ll find a creative approach behind things like:

• Philosophy
• Frameworks
• Analogies
• Stories

The creativity might be in coming up with the ideas or concepts, communicating them, or both.

Building

There is a creative force behind anything you build, whether that is tangible (like a building or a cabinet) or intangible (like systems, processes, or software code).

Problem-solving

Problem-solving at its best is inherently creative. The creativity can come into play in looking at the problem in new and different ways, in the questions you ask to explore the possibilities, or the ways you can see to use existing resources

Design

Design in all its forms, whether interior design, product design, graphic design, or some other variation, is a vehicle for creativity. Some of it is purely aesthetically driven, some of it is functionally driven, and some of it is both.

Repurposing

Repurposing involves taking one thing (for example, a weathered window frame) and imagining different applications for it (you might hang the window frame in front of a white wall and use it as a whiteboard).

Inventing

Invention, the process of coming up with something that didn’t exist before, is by definition a creative act.

That’s by no stretch of the imagination a comprehensive list, but hopefully it drives the point home that creativity can find its expression in many forms.

Four basic flavors of creativity

In its simplest essence, you can think of creativity as showing up in four distinct ways.

Out of thin air: This is the “something out of nothing” variety. Many types of artistic expression would fall under this one, as would invention.

Transformation: This involves taking something and turning it into something else. Repurposing is an example of this.

Building blocks: This entails taking basic materials/resources/ideas/etc. and putting them together to create something new. Both a construction site and creative problem solving are examples of creative endeavors that have this quality.

Organization and order: Paradoxically, it takes a creative mind to clarify, simplify, or distill. You might find this kind of creativity in a framework a consultant created to simplify a complex process to make it easier to understand, or a well-ordered closet where everything has an easily-found place.

Wherever it takes you, if creativity is a part of your meaning menu, you’ll find no end of opportunities to experience it, once you start looking.

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