blackbird

Monday, April 14, 2014

Difference #9 — Getting to know my creative self

This is a continuation of a blog post written by   titled 18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently. I found it both enlightening and at times even comical in the spot on description of myself. Instead of quoting the entire post at length in a single setting, I decided I would let the world get to know me through this one excerpt at a time.

Here is a repeat of the intro to the post -
18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently
"Creativity works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Inspiration and ideas often arise seemingly out of nowhere and then fail to show up when we most need them, and creative thinking requires complex cognition yet is completely distinct from the thinking process.
Neuroscience paints a complicated picture of creativity. As scientists now understand it, creativity is far more complex than the right-left brain distinction would have us think (the theory being that left brain = rational and analytical, right brain = creative and emotional). In fact, creativity is thought to involve a number of cognitive processes, neural pathways and emotions, and we still don't have the full picture of how the imaginative mind works.
And psychologically speaking, creative personality types are difficult to pin down, largely because they're complex, paradoxical and tend to avoid habit or routine. And it's not just a stereotype of the "tortured artist" -- artists really may be more complicated people. Research has suggested that creativity involves the coming together of a multitude of traits, behaviors and social influences in a single person.
"It's actually hard for creative people to know themselves because the creative self is more complex than the non-creative self," Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York University who has spent years researching creativity, told The Huffington Post. "The things that stand out the most are the paradoxes of the creative self ... Imaginative people have messier minds."
While there's no "typical" creative type, there are some tell-tale characteristics and behaviors of highly creative people."

Here is #9

They people-watch.

"Observant by nature and curious about the lives of others, creative types often love to people-watch -- and they may generate some of their best ideas from it.
"[Marcel] Proust spent almost his whole life people-watching, and he wrote down his observations, and it eventually came out in his books," says Kaufman. "For a lot of writers, people-watching is very important ... They're keen observers of human nature."

I would characterize myself as an "observer" not only people watching though, I like to find things and make a play on words to make it something funny. For instance when I was driving to work and saw a computer monitor just sitting in the KMart parking lot.....

I posted, "When management said the parking lot needed to be monitored, I don't think this is what they meant." 

or the time I saw a bunch of shopping carts in the ditch and I posted the picture and the comment, "Breaking news, there has been a 21 cart pile up on Lorraine Street!" 

Even if other people don't find me funny, I crack myself up, and that's important too.........right?

 

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