Understanding The Effect Age Has On Creativity
If you are in the business of creating, whether it is art
, music compositions, jewelry design, or even construction, creativity is an essential element to all of them. While you are aging, you may be curious as to the effect that the years will have on your ability to design and create.
A popular perception is that creativity and old age do not mix. Creativity is the domain of the young, yet not in the way that many of us would expect.
Our decline in creativity does not start when we are forty or fifty. It starts around the age when we enter school!
Around the age of five, we are using about eighty percent of our creative potential. We invent daily-it does not matter than our inventions have been invented before, the fact is that we are innovating at a remarkable rate.
By the age of twelve, our creative output has declined to about two percent of our potential, and it generally stays there for the rest of our lives. We learn that to live with other people, you must follow their rules and values, which seem to be more about what you cannot do, than what you can do.
Schools especially drill conformity into us. We learn that there is one true way of thinking.
We learn that there is one right answer for every problem, and that this is the one in the teacher's head. Success is based on knowing what is wanted, not what is interesting.
By the time we leave full-time education, we are functional members of society, but our creative potential has been very largely stifled. As adults, we do become less creative, but not in the traditional way.
Our continued creative decline is more due to falling into a number of cognitive traps, than the fading of old age. Where creativity does fade away is when we do not use it.
One of the biggest culprits here is the simple pattern of human habit. Once we start doing something one way, we get comfortable with it and then do not change or vary it.
We find the best route home and then we always drive that way, even if it is choked with traffic. We also get stuck in common vernacular and familiar conversations.
Those of us who do study and become experts can easily fall into the expert trap, where experts can spend more time defending their hill than building it further. We repeat this in our roles in organizations.
When you are a manager, you find you have the rapt attention of everyone below you, and it is very easy to assume that they are in thrall of your intelligence and wisdom. The trap here is to assume that you are all-knowing, and to pronounce with great certainty on all and sundry.
The cycle repeats at home, where parents take a similar role, being the fount of all knowledge for their children, who learn that being an adult means being certain and certainly not being creative. Intelligence is, to some extent related to creativity, and brighter people generally are able to be more creative.
Another reason is the premature closure of quick thinking, where bright people 'get it' in seconds flat and hence stop any further divergent thinking. The secret of life is staying creative.
Keep your creative juices flowing and you will stay ahead of the pack. The best way of staving off creative ossification is to keep doing different things.
Read different books and papers. Go to different places for your holidays.
Talk to different people. Listen to them and seek to synthesize and get new ideas by brainstorming.
Take every opportunity to regenerate your generative powers. People who have stayed creative through their lives are way above others, not only people on the final lap but also those much younger than them.
With practice, you can get better at creativity, which puts a creatively active sixty-year-old streets ahead of a stultified thirty-year-old. It has been proven that people who stay mentally active live longer even than those who stay physically active.
If you go to the mental gym every day, then your alertness will keep you going longer. Now get out there and creating something!
by: Tommy Greene
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