Creative Personality with Paradoxical Traits

Creative personality seems to be more colorful and paradoxical.

Creativity is the #1 needed skill now because digital is the age of innovation. The problem is that creativity cannot be taught, it’s not an ability which can be imposed by instruction, calculated via algorithms or practiced with linear thinking only. History teaches that those gifted with ingenuity don't need stimulating, while those without it are barren ground when it comes to original thinking. In fact, creative personality has some paradoxical traits. Creativity, originality, ingenuity, and insight need to be discovered by talented people on their own, though they cannot be completely taught, they can be developed and nurtured to reach the abundance of creativity.

Open and quiet: Creative people are open-minded. Creative people often do not blindly follow conventional wisdom. Creative people judge the world for themselves and they are skeptical of but open with outside opinions. Openness is the most difficult thing to refresh your mind and create novel ideas. Creative people define and create their own convention that they live by in comparison to everyone else who just accept or inherit their convention to live by. Therefore, creative people can see old things in new ways from different angles. They not only take the conscious application of what they know, and at the same time stay open to the unknown, so creative thinking and knowledge can emerge. Creative people are expressive as well, but it doesn’t mean that they are always outgoing or talkative. On the opposite, often, creativity flourished in solitude. With quietness, you can hear your thoughts, you can reach deep within yourself, you can focus on creating more ideas. Finding the balance is key. Though not every creative person is a “solitude genius.” Still, you have both solitude and participation! this is the point. They obviously have to come at different times.

Playful, but also disciplined: Creativity is like the seeds, to grow it, you need to have the level of curiosity, desire to learn, observe, with the natural ability to maintain an open and inquisitive mind and have a playful attitude to discover and experiment. it is important to have a motivational environment to encourage creativity, with less restricted rules, or breaking down the outdated rules for sparking creativity. On the other side, it needs a certain discipline to keep focus. Because being "unruly" incurs risk, you need to set the updated principles and the right discipline for managing the innovation and mitigating the risks. Creativity suspends or defers judgment. Creativity demands the possibility of the wrong in order to be exploring in a free and playful way. To develop creativity, it is important to be passionate about learning and growing. It also doesn’t mean creativity lack of the principles, the well-set disciplines can streamline the train of the diversified thoughts and the fountain of creativity.

Smart and childish: Creative people are intellectually curious, and energetic. Creativity is about thinking beyond conventional wisdom, or the “Out of Box” thinking. It is also a high-level intelligence because creativity evolves different dimensions of thinking and the multitude of thought processes such as association, perspective shifting, divergent thinking, etc; or the conscious-subconscious continuum. Creativity is infused with an inner cohesion and comes from a vision of uniqueness. The interesting fact is that creative people are often childish as well. Child-like thinking can produce innovation, because they have the beginner’s mind, and they enjoy experimenting and discovering as well. Children are a good example of having that kind of open-mindedness, curiosity, and joy for exploring and questioning. Creativity is a flow, an abstract, an imagination, and an association -the unusual dots connections. When you grow up, live up or down to other people’s expectation, or you overly worry about “fitting in,” you set to fall into conventional wisdom, lose your creativity.

There are creative people in almost every profession. Creative personality seems to be more colorful and paradoxical. There are probably several components that are important for being innovative, such as being imaginable, inquisitive, proactive, knowable (multi T-shaped), playful, having strong social capital and being at the right place at the right time.

Posted in: Creativity,IT Innovation