What Creativity Really Is (and How to Get More of It)

You’ve probably told yourself, at least once, “I’m just not a creative person.” It feels like a fact about who you are, like your height or your eye color. It isn’t. Creativity is not a gift handed to a lucky few at birth, and it doesn’t arrive as a lightning bolt in the shower. It’s a set of mechanics you can learn, practice, and get visibly better at.

This article strips creativity down to how it actually works inside your mind, and hands you the levers to pull more of it on demand.

Why this matters

The belief that creativity is a fixed, mysterious gift quietly does real damage. It gives you permission to stop trying. If you decide the trait was never in your DNA, there’s no reason to practice, so you don’t, and the belief proves itself.

But creativity isn’t optional anymore, and it isn’t just for artists. Writing code nobody has written, designing a smoother checkout flow, explaining a hard idea to a six-year-old, figuring out dinner from a near-empty fridge: all of it is creative work. The moment you treat creativity as a skill instead of a personality type, you can train it the way you’d train anything else.

Three myths worth throwing out

Before the mechanics, let’s clear away the wrong ideas most people carry.

Myth 1: “Creative people are born, not made”

This is the most damaging one, because it ends the conversation before it starts. Psychologist Carol Dweck’s research at Stanford found that people with a fixed mindset, the belief that ability is locked in, achieve less, quit faster, and avoid challenges. People with a growth mindset, who believe ability grows through practice, pull ahead over time.

The kicker: when 143 creativity researchers were polled on the single most important ingredient in creative achievement, the top answer wasn’t talent. It was perseverance and resilience, qualities any person can build.

Myth 2: “Creativity is only for artists”

The output doesn’t have to be a painting. Anywhere a new and useful idea is needed, creativity is at work. Engineers, doctors, teachers, and parents solve novel problems every single day. If you’ve ever found a clever workaround, you’ve been creative.

Myth 3: “Creativity is a sudden flash of inspiration”

The “eureka moment” is real, but it’s one small step in a long process. We remember Archimedes leaping from his bath shouting “Eureka!” because the instant feels dramatic. What nobody remembers is the weeks of grinding preparation that made the flash possible. The spark never lands on empty ground.

The real definition: novel AND useful

Decades of study have settled on a clean, practical definition:

Creativity is producing ideas or things that are both novel and useful.

Both words carry weight:

• Novel means new, or an unfamiliar combination of familiar things.
• Useful means it serves a purpose: it solves a problem, communicates something, or works in the real world.

A new idea that helps nobody is just novelty. A useful idea that already exists everywhere is just competence. Creativity lives where the two overlap.

Cognitive scientist Margaret Boden adds a helpful distinction between two kinds of “new”:

• New to you (she calls it P-creative): the idea is fresh for you, even if someone, somewhere, thought of it first.
• New to the world (H-creative): nobody in history has produced it before.

Most everyday creativity is the first kind, and that’s completely fine. A student who independently works out a proof Euler discovered 200 years ago has done something genuinely creative. The thinking was real. The discovery was real for them. You don’t have to be first in human history to be creative.

Where ideas come from: connecting things

So where do novel-and-useful ideas actually come from? Almost always from combining existing things in new ways.

Steve Jobs put it bluntly in a 1996 interview with WIRED:

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something… they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

Your brain doesn’t conjure ideas from nothing. It recombines patterns, memories, and concepts you already carry. The more raw material you have, and the more varied it is, the more connections become possible.

Look at almost any breakthrough and you’ll find a remix:

• The airplane combined a combustion engine with the shape of a bird’s wing.
• Netflix combined mail-order DVD rental with subscription pricing.
• Gutenberg’s printing press (1440) combined a wine-making screw press with movable type. Neither piece was new. The combination changed the world.

That’s the practical takeaway: to get more creative, widen your inputs. Read across fields. Talk to people outside your industry. Collect more dots, and more connections become available to you.

Two modes: diverge, then converge

In 1950, psychologist J.P. Guilford pointed out that standard intelligence tests measured only one kind of thinking and missed the kind that matters most for creativity. He named two modes.

• Divergent thinking branches outward to generate many possible ideas. The goal is quantity and variety. The question is: How many different ways could we solve this?
• Convergent thinking narrows down to evaluate and pick the best option. The goal is one strong answer. The question is: Which of these is actually the best?

You need both, in the right order: diverge first, then converge. Diverge without converging and you get a messy pile of ideas and no action. Converge without diverging and you grab the first half-decent idea, because you never made alternatives to compare it against.

Think of mining for gold. Divergent thinking is the dynamite and pickaxe: blast open as much rock as you can. Convergent thinking is the sluice box: sift carefully for the valuable pieces. You can’t sift rubble you never dug up.

The creative process: four stages

In 1926, British psychologist Graham Wallas proposed the first systematic model of how creativity unfolds over time. Nearly a century later, his four stages still hold up.

1. Preparation. You gather information, define the problem, and immerse yourself in the relevant material. This is deliberate, effortful work. The mind fills up with raw ingredients.
2. Incubation. You step away and stop consciously thinking about it. This is not wasted time. Your unconscious keeps working, quietly connecting the material you loaded. It’s why ideas arrive in the shower, on a walk, or right before sleep.
3. Illumination. The insight clicks. This is the “aha” moment, and it feels almost magical, but it’s just the payoff from stages one and two. No preparation and incubation, no illumination.
4. Verification. You test, refine, and build the idea into something real. This is where most of the actual work lives. The insight is a rough direction, not a finished product.

The practical move hiding in here: schedule incubation on purpose. When you’re stuck on something hard, stop grinding and do something physical or unrelated. Sleep on it, literally. Wallas’s model tells you this isn’t laziness. It’s a required step.

Why quantity comes before quality

Here’s the most counterintuitive truth about creativity: the path to your best ideas runs straight through a lot of mediocre ones.

The book Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland tells a story about a ceramics teacher who split his class in two on day one. The quantity group would be graded purely on the weight of pots produced: 50 pounds earned an A. The quality group would be graded on a single pot: one perfect piece earned an A.

At term’s end, the best pots all came from the quantity group.

Why? While the quality group sat theorizing about the perfect pot, the quantity group made pot after pot, learned from each failure, and got better with every attempt. They produced quality by chasing volume.

This isn’t just a fable:

• Picasso made an estimated 20,000 works. A handful are masterpieces.
• Edison held 1,093 patents. A few changed civilization.
• Shakespeare wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets. They are not all equally good.

The masterpieces and the forgotten work came from the same engine: someone who kept producing. High output wasn’t separate from the quality. It was the cause of it.

So set quantity goals, not perfection goals. Instead of “I’ll write one great post,” try “I’ll write eight posts this month.” The eighth will beat the first, and it’ll beat anything you’d have made by aiming only for “a great one.”

Common misconceptions

• “Failing at a creative task means I’m not creative.” Failure is feedback. Each miss teaches you something the next attempt uses. The people who improve are the ones who fail more, not less.
• “I should wait until I have the perfect idea before I start.” Waiting is how good ideas rot into what some call “idea debt.” Shipping imperfect work teaches you what actually lands, in ways no amount of planning can.
• “Brainstorming and judging happen together.” This is the single biggest killer of divergent thinking. When your inner critic runs at the same time as your idea generator, you self-censor before ideas fully form. Keep the two phases strictly apart.
• “The aha moment is the creative act.” The flash is one stage of four. Skip preparation and the flash never comes; skip verification and the idea never becomes real.

How to use this

Five concrete levers, all trainable:

1. Widen your inputs. Read outside your field, visit new places, talk to people who think differently. More dots means more possible connections.
2. Practice diverging. Set a 10-minute timer and generate as many ideas as you can without judging a single one. Do it regularly. Like a muscle, it strengthens.
3. Protect incubation. Build stepping-away into your process. Take the walk. Sleep on the hard problem. That’s stage two, not slacking.
4. Raise your output volume. More attempts means more learning means better work over time. The ceramics result is repeatable in your own life.
5. Separate generation from evaluation. Keep the critic offline while you brainstorm. Invite it back only when you converge.

Conclusion

If you take one thing from this, take this: creativity is a skill, not a gift, and the mechanics are no longer a mystery. Combine more things, diverge before you converge, respect the four stages, and chase volume over perfection. Do those deliberately and you will become measurably more creative. Nothing in your DNA gets a vote.

Which raises an interesting follow-up. If creativity is trainable, what’s actually happening in your brain during that quiet incubation stage, while your mind solves problems you’ve stopped consciously thinking about? That hidden machinery is where the next part of the story begins.