If you think freedom is simple, ask someone what freedom means to them. Any word that evokes emotion, whether a scoff at its assumed melodrama or a primal widening of the eyes. Freedom is a word that might evoke a certain color or clothing item to some, while it conjures a vague idea that requires unquestioned intensity to others. Freedom is plagued by stereotypes–the poisonous shortcuts we inevitably take and forgot we took to navigate complexity.
The complexity of our relationship to the word freedom proves how prone it is to misunderstanding. While freedom has plenty to do with politics, policy, and history, it’s also inseparable from a less-expected concept: creativity.
But now I introduce an equally complicated term and ask a lot of you as a reader. We’ve examined freedom, now let’s take another term whose simplicity evaporates upon examination. Creative freedom sounds like something that belongs to people whose career ends in a pool of vomit and managed to be great enough to make even that seem romantic enough to abstain from judging it. These people are really creative–perhaps fatally so.
Artists monopolized the concept of creativity with the help of very uncreative scientific attempts at researching creativity. Artists are specialists in creativity, but you don’t have to be a specialist to still deal with a subject just as your general practitioner can treat your everyday ails without needing the expertise of surgical techniques. Whether you’re conscious of it or not–and most people aren’t–creation is part of your everyday life. When you make a choice, that choice yields an outcome.
Your choices can create your life, but they can also destroy it. Creative freedom is what you take hold of when you make the choices you think will enact the outcome you want.
Just like an artist chooses the color or instrument they believe will enact their vision, you make choices just as often and with just as much impact on whether they’ll yield the vision you have for your life. Creative freedom is what we own when we consciously seek out the choices we can make to yield the outcomes we want, instead of letting other people infringe on our freedom by making our choices for us.
During a time when more people and leaders feel entitled to condemn creative freedom by demonizing our right to choose our path, you can defend your creative freedom by refusing to outsource your choices to those who pressure you.
Your life and the choices you make throughout it are an intrinsic part of who you are and will be. Creative freedom is the core of our lives and the root from which all other freedom must grow.
—Salomé
Quote of the Month
Creativity can be a confusing concept; it seems like some mystical muse or intrinsic talent that only a select few will ever experience. Just because researchers have misunderstood creativity for decades doesn’t mean you should write it off, though.
At its core, creativity is the skill of finding connections between seemingly unrelated things.
When a painter brings pattern and color together in a way that makes you feel awe or when a musician joins a range of different sounds in a way that feels like a familiar story, you’re observing the effects of creativity. Phrased less creatively: creativity is taking elements that are meaningless on their own and connecting them together to create discernible meaning.
Don’t let the mystique around creativity persuade you that this skill doesn’t apply to you. While some people are exceptionally creative, all humans are designed to seek and identify patterns.
If you learn to seek patterns between things that aren’t immediately connected, you’ll be more creative–no magic or epiphany needed.
Whether you're starting a business or a family, finding connections between things you wouldn’t expect will help you solve problems in new and better ways. Even if your self-instructed creativity training only boosts it by 1%...can anybody honestly say they wouldn’t benefit from being just 1% better at solving all their problems?
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