What I think Creativity is!
There are many ways to define Creativity. Creativity means the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work. “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep- Scott Adams.” The business world is full of artistic tasks such as analyzing the performance or making a business plan. Creativity refers to the unique way one perform its tasks because every problem doesn’t have only one solution to it. Creativity to me means thinking out of the box. Honestly, I feel I am not creative at all but after coming to my ESP 103 class, I learned each and every person is creative. What the person needs is motivation to bring out his/her creativity. Everyone in this world is creative in one or the other way and one can become more creative with more practice. Also, creativity is not only limited to arts but it can be applied in every subject matter in this world. I feel being creative will change your life for the betterment of it. A creative person is a person who applies strategies to solve problems that are ambiguous, complex and unprecedented. A creative person is an individual who makes a lot of mistakes but learns from it. However, there are a lot of reasons which I think stops a person from being creative. Following are the reasons:
The pressure from parents and teachers stops a student from being creative. They restrict the student to do whatever required within a certain boundary. I feel creativity is limitless and there are no restrictions and boundaries for creativity. The student should be given a chance to show his creativity and monitored if he is going on the right path. In some cases, as we grow up, the creativity dies inside us.
Although a deadline is an important part of an assigned task, deadlines are something which I feel kills creativity. Deadline forces the person to submit the task on time no matter how good or bad you do and sometimes does not give enough time and opportunity to the person to show his/her creativity.
The mental locks in one’s mind restricts creativity. The type of mindset that a child gets ever since he is born shapes his type of thinking.
Personal Experience
I would like to share one of my personal experience where I felt me and my band members did something creative which no one would have done. We as a band thought to cover a song and put the video on YouTube. We thought it wasn’t a big deal if we make a cover of a song and put that on YouTube. Then an idea struck in my mind which I thought would make our cover different. We decided to cover a song called “21 Guns” by GreenDay which is an American punk rock band. As the song requires all the western instruments, we decided to cover the song mainly on Indian Classical instruments while using some Western instruments. The main classical instrument used was ‘Tabla’ which is an Indian percussion instrument and was used in place of drums. Instead of an electric guitar we used an Indian Classical guitar. We had to use a bass guitar which was the only western instrument. We also added ‘Harmonium’ which we thought would add a little more Indian touch to our cover or as we call it in India, some “Desi feel”. The cover when recorded turned out to be good. We covered an English song with the use of Classical instruments while not making any changes to the composition. The video never got on to YouTube as we all broke up as a band soon after completing the cover. But this is what I feel creativity is, thinking out of the box and doing something which no one else could think of. I would like to end by saying if a person is creative, he wouldn’t think what the others are thinking and would continue to do what he is passionate about, which sometimes might be weird to other people.
