Creativity has played many roles in my life. The study of creativity is the driving force of my career, so at one level it is my livelihood. I study, think about, teach, and talk about creativity all the time. But my relationship with creativity is also deeply personal. My own creativity has helped me do many things across different dimensions of my life.

It’s helped me connect with other people. Creativity is a common language that can bridge gaps. It’s helped me recognize kindred spirits. It’s enabled me to entertain people and show my love of friends and family. Creativity has improved the quality of my life. It lets me amuse myself when I’m bored and calm down when I’m panicking. It helps me figure out solutions and express my emotions. It gets me out of trouble (and sometimes gets me into trouble).

Applying my creativity to writing gave me my first true passion, one that exists to this day. Before I knew anything, I wanted to be a writer. I tried fiction, journalism, and the occasional poem before settling into playwriting. I’ve sat in the back of the theatre, in its blissful darkness, and seen my words come out of other people’s mouths. I’ve felt intense gratitude and awe at the way a talented director and cast can take what I’ve done and make it so much better. I’ve experienced the numbness of repeated rejections (and, worse, seen acceptances and agreements fall through). I’ve bounced between intense pride and deep embarrassment as I’ve eavesdropped on audience members. It’s broken my heart. It’s given me a purpose.

Being able to use my creativity as a central part of my job helps me love what I do. I try to teach creatively (while teaching about creativity). I usually teach two Introduction to Creativity classes at the University of Connecticut (UConn) each semester. Before that, I taught a class on Intelligence and Creativity (and a Critical Thinking class that included creativity) at the California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB). I’ve changed up and reorganized and played with the structure and content of these classes most semesters, to introduce often radical shifts that keep me from being complacent and getting bored. This constant shuffling softened the impact of the sudden transition to remote teaching that happened when the pandemic hit. The resulting chaos was manageable.

What has been consistent for many years is that the centerpiece of every class is a semester-long project where the primary requirement is simply to do something creative. This “something” can manifest itself in many different ways. I usually see roughly three categories of students. First there are the experienced creators. They are eager to try a new activity or return to an area of comfort and expertise. Then there are the rusty creators. These ones are trained to play the game of school and perform on cue.Footnote ¹ They may hesitate for a few weeks, to make sure that it’s not a trick, and then they tackle a forgotten passion or a back-burnered whim. Finally there are the skeptics. These are in the class because they’ve heard that it’s fun (or that I’m an easy grader), but they don’t think of themselves as creative. They need some coaxing and handholding. Some never fully commit. Others throw themselves into their creativity project. The results – for all students – vary wildly. They range from gems I still remember years later to smaller bursts of self-expression that nonetheless offered insight, amusement, or self-awareness.

It is possible to love something without making a life of studying it (indeed, I can’t begin to tell you how they make Count Chocula, the cereal). But I have been lucky enough to get to do both. It can be hard to explain why a topic, a product, or an issue is so important to you. Sometimes you get a lot of practice, such as when you love a movie that is obscure, esoteric, or divisive (let’s say, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, The Quick and the Dead, or Under the Silver Lake). But it can be even harder to explain your passion for a film that is generally accepted and even liked. If I’m asked to defend The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, or Citizen Kane, it’s a new experience. Most people either love these movies and respect them or hate them but know enough to keep quiet.

Even if someone, knowingly or not, is genuinely biased against creative people,Footnote ² such a person is unlikely to break unspoken social norms and talk about it. Few people besides literal cartoon villains (like those in Phineas and Ferb and The Simpsons) will embark on a long rant against creativity. So it feels counterintuitive (frankly, the word I’m looking for is weird) to write a book that has the goal of highlighting many of the positive and meaningful outcomes that can flow from being creative. There aren’t many books dedicated to why getting an unexpected salary increase is actually a good thing.

Creativity is popular when it is a vague concept or a buzzword. When it comes time to divvy up resources and priorities, though, usually creativity somehow ends up lagging behind.Footnote ³ Many of the people who publicly lead the call for creativity weave in misconceptions and misinformation. Perhaps most notably, the “why is creativity important?” aspect is often back-burnered – even by academics.Footnote ⁴ But before you can begin to tackle the “why” you need to take care of the “what.”

I am well acquainted with the “what is creativity?” question. Between my time at UConn, my time at CSUSB, and my travels around the world, I’ve given the basic introductory creativity lecture to well over five thousand people (possibly more, but I wouldn’t know – I’m a psychologist, not a mathematician). I’ve also given talks about the broader topic to many thousands of people.

How Do Real People Define Creativity?

I try to start with a basic definition of creativity. The word can be used with many different connotations, depending on the context. For example, it can be a true compliment:

It can be a consolation prize:

Or it can be a backhanded aside:

I have found that most people have no particular opinion or inclination about how to use or define creativity. I am not surprised; I haven’t spent time thinking about the larger definitional issues surrounding collateral damage or will-o-the-wisp or schadenfreude. The first Polish encyclopedia, under horse, told readers that a horse was a horse; anyone could just see what it is.Footnote ⁵ It’s a horse. It’s creativity. We all know what that is, right?

Well… it’s complicated. Once you get people to take a moment, think, and discuss the question, you start to notice patterns. Whenever the question of how science might approach creativity comes up, people tend to assume that creativity is impossible to define. I am not talking only about students; I have read many academic papers that begin by stating, “No one knows how to define creativity.” For a critical reader, this opening should raise a pretty big red flag right away.Footnote ⁶ It makes me cringe a little, much like when I read my tenth straight student paper that chooses the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of creativity as a starting point.

There have been some studies where researchers asked “average people” more pointed questions about creativity, such as whether different behaviors or characteristics are representative of a creative person. A study in the United States found that laypeople associated four different personal attributes with creativity dimensions: nonentrenchment (i.e., not seeing things as fixed or unchangeable), aesthetic taste, perspicacity (i.e., sharp insight), and inquisitiveness.Footnote ⁷ Comparable results were found in Korea.Footnote ⁸ Another study asked gifted adolescents (students) both about their own creativity and about other people’s creativity – how they saw it, for example. When participants were thinking about other people, the four factors were activity level (i.e., being active and energetic), artistic individualism, popularity, and questioning. These make sense, right? However, when the same people thought about themselves, they converged on four different dimensions: awkwardness, impulsiveness, intellect, and risk-taking.Footnote ⁹ It’s a little funny and sad that a study about a totally different topic nonetheless captures the painful embarrassment and ennui of being a teenager.

A common thread I found both in conversations and in essays written by noncreativity researchers is the idea that no one can agree on a definition of creativity. I mean, in a very technical sense, you could argue that there is no universally agreed-upon meaning of the word creativity, much as there is no complete consensus on what constitutes “good literature.” Do the Harry Potter books count? And, if Harry Potter, why not The Hunger Games, or Twilight? How about Stephen King? John Grisham? James Patterson? At what point do we wonder whether outstanding movies or television shows qualify as “good literature”? Or is the use of the term literature reserved for the written word? Is a play literature when it is written, but not when it is performed? What about audio books?

Plus, of course, there is never universal agreement on anything. One dentist out of ten (perhaps under the thumb of Big Sugar) may well recommend not brushing your teeth at all. Somewhere, right now, someone is insisting that llamas are simply female alpacas, that Homer wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays, or that the “p” is pronounced in pterodactyl. Complete consensus is virtually impossible.

Nonetheless, within the small club of creativity researchers, we absolutely know how to define creativity. In fact there is an almost stunning level of agreement, which goes back more than seven decades.Footnote ¹⁰ I’m not saying that we have settled on a precise or helpful definition, but we have an established one. We are even slowly getting better at including an explicit definition of creativity in our studies. An excellent review of the field in 2004 noted that only 38 percent of papers offered an explicit definition outright;Footnote ¹¹ a more recent study found that by 2016 the rate was up to 56 percent.Footnote ¹² At least there is progress.

How Do Researchers Define Creativity?

Something is creative to the extent that it possesses two core components. The first is easy to guess: it needs to be original, new, novel, or different. If it’s an exact copy of an existing object or idea, it’s probably not creative. Think about a little kid getting a laugh with a funny line. With that positive reinforcement, their inclination will likely be to do it again. Exactly the same way. And then again, and again. The fourth identical punchline wouldn’t be considered new or creative.

Similarly, imagine that you are eating at a burger joint and you think, “Hey, I bet a beef patty between two pieces of curved dough would taste great!” You are not being creative. You are holding a hamburger and eating it, so thinking of the existence of a hamburger is not new. It is possible that you are thinking only of a tiny, itty bitty new twist on a hamburger – and that would count. But it has to be at least the tiniest bit new. Remember, I don’t necessarily mean groundbreaking or unique – just a little off the beaten path. As we will discuss, even your own version of an existing creative work can still qualify.

This first prong of being new is not enough. If your toilet clogs up and you decide to drop five boxes of instant pudding into the bowl to clear it out, that is certainly different. Few people have intentionally made this decision. Yet your toilet will still be stuffed up and it will now look disgusting (even if it may taste delicious). Deciding to try to swap out ingredients is great – but if your plan is to take out eggs from your recipe and substitute angry wasps, I would not call that creative (nor would I eat your omelettes).

If simple novelty were all that was required for creativity, then I could be incredibly creative right now, at will. I could write a brand-new sentence that would be a radical departure from what I’ve written before, maybe from anything ever written. I mean, if you think about it, then turtle pomegranate shark-infested waters with a ham on rye. I can see John Adams is eating fire ants while he juggles a puce unicorn or learns to hammer with pudding or makes Donny Osmond do handstands with bacon grease on the bottom of his feet. You could even argue that I’m still not being different enough – I’m using punctuation and some kind of word formation, in which case I 7JP-**~Kor5???

No, being new is not enough. The second requirement is that, to be creative, something must also be useful, task appropriate, or relevant.Footnote ¹³ At the most basic level, the creative work needs to do what it is supposed to do. A meal is useful if people eat it (enjoyment is preferred, but not required). A water filtration system is useful insofar as it successfully purifies your water; if the system actually adds particles of dirt or arsenic, it is not task appropriate. An abstract painting may be useful if viewers find it beautiful or if it inspires emotion, thought, or pleasure. A lawyer’s closing argument should offer the defendant or plaintiff at least a reasonable chance of winning; if the lawyer looks at the jury and simply says “Kumquats” repeatedly for five minutes, the argument is not task appropriate.Footnote ¹⁴ A character in Tom Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase says, a bit bitingly, that “skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”Footnote ¹⁵ With the caveat that I do not share the same disdain for modern art, there is a need for a happy balance between skill (or at least relevance) and imagination, to allow true creativity to emerge.

The importance of usefulness can vary according to how functional the creative work is supposed to be.Footnote ¹⁶ So, to paraphrase an example that my friend David Cropley uses, an architect may design a bridge that is so stirringly beautiful that it makes you weep. But if that bridge falls down, it’s not useful, and therefore not creative. If the task-appropriate aspect of a functional creativity product fails, people can die. That’s simply not true in the case of art (leaving aside the occasional death caused by some unfortunate accident, as when one of Christo’s umbrella installations was torn from its steel base and killed a visitor).Footnote ¹⁷ I managed to see Cats in the movie theatre, in its original run (not to mention Showgirls, much earlier). The magnitude of its awfulness, which transcended camp, was so over the top that it almost inspired tenderness and pity rather than disdain. Yet, even as Rebel Wilson began eating the human-faced singing cockroaches, my kidneys continued to filter out impurities and excess liquids. My pancreas kept producing insulin. My larynx did not suddenly decide to leave my trachea unprotected. No matter how bad Cats was, I did not die from it.

It’s also important to note that sometimes a use may not be obvious. Think about Matty Benedetto, an inventor with a self-styled “wall of unnecessary.” He aims to solve nonexistent problems, which is usually not the best strategy for an entrepreneur. His inventions are numerous. They include the FurRoller, which adds fake dog hair to your clothing so you can pretend to have a dog, StubStoppers, small hats to protect one’s toes, and a Chip-Xractor, designed to hoover out the last chip stuck in the packaging.Footnote ¹⁸ Obviously there was not a significant demand for these or any of his nearly 200 inventions. Yet, although his products are not useful in a traditional way, I would argue that inspiring amusement is a use. Further, he makes a living not by selling most of these items but by getting endorsements from big brands that like his idiosyncratic sense of humor and want to attract the type of people who would find Benedetto’s work funny. At first glance, his inventions are not useful. If you look deeper, they do serve a purpose, even if not the one allegedly intended for them.

Although early pioneers such as J. P. GuilfordFootnote ¹⁹ and Frank BarronFootnote ²⁰ are often given credit (sometimes by me) for helping shape how we define creativity, the first scholar to actually articulate what is often considered the standard definition of creativityFootnote ²¹ was Moe Stein, who in 1953 wrote that a “creative work is a novel work that is accepted as tenable or useful by a group in some point in time.”Footnote ²² Stein does not get enough credit; he was also a very early scholar to be interested in creativity and culture. When Paul Torrance, a legend we will soon discuss in more detail, passed away, I helped coedit a special issue of Creativity Research Journal in his honor.Footnote ²³ I reached out to Stein, who was incredibly nice and gracious and agreed to contribute a piece. I was confused when, at some point in our communications, he stopped getting back to me, until I found out much later that he had passed. He is only one of many creativity greats with whom I had a small interaction before discovering the extent of their contributions. Stein’s note about a specific group and a specific time period was also prescient in terms of the importance of context. What is considered creative in one particular situation (be that a culture, a time period, a scenario, or a population) may not be considered so in another.Footnote ²⁴

There are other proposed additions to this “new and useful” definition; some suggestions include the elements of surprise,Footnote ²⁵ high quality,Footnote ²⁶ and authenticity.Footnote ²⁷ It can be hard to articulate exactly how these necessarily differ; for example, can you easily imagine something that is not new yet is still surprising (not counting mediocre horror movies)? Relatedly, how do you know if a work is authentic? Would it bother you to know that its creator had disowned and criticized your favorite movie, book, or song? Perhaps – but would you consider it less creative for that reason, or of lower quality? These are all questions up for debate. However, if you stick with “new and appropriate,” you cannot go too far wrong.

You may point out that this definition is quite open. So open, in fact, that it may not be terribly useful. What has been eliminated from creativity, other than pure repetition or total ignorance?Footnote ²⁸ If you are trying to add 4 + 4 and someone says, “The answer is not 23 and it’s not 59,” that person’s hint is of limited help.

In addition, as Kirill Miroshnik pointed out to me, there are even times when the standard definition doesn’t seem to work perfectly, at least if we see creativity as confined to traditionally living things. A philosopher has noted that the Earth’s natural movements can produce diamondsFootnote ²⁹ – heck, Uranus’ and Neptune’s atmospheres may make it possible to rain diamonds.Footnote ³⁰ Diamonds are certainly valuable, and most are, in their own way, unique (and thus novel). Using this same logic, Rudolf Arnheim argued that a tree behaves creatively as it seeks light and spreads out its branches.Footnote ³¹ Is the Earth creative? Other planets? Trees? I mean… maybe?

Why Bother?

Perhaps you are instead thinking about the futility of the whole endeavor. Who cares if researchers agree on a definition? Does it even matter? Certainly, some creativity researchers have already come to the conclusion that it does not.Footnote ³² Many other people who are not in the field might say the same – but for different reasons. What do I mean? Well, picture me at a cocktail party (or whatever you call it – the kind of event you attend once you are too old to drink regularly and not classy enough to be invited to nice affairs). I am likely standing awkwardly in a corner, debating the pros and cons of making another pass at the snacks or desserts, wherever they are set out. I may be glancing at my watch. Let us suppose that, right when I ponder making a quick dash for the door, someone stops me. For whatever reason, they recognize me and vaguely remember that I study creativity. They ask me what I do – what does it mean to be a creativity researcher?

If the person I am talking to is a scientist, they may interpret my study of creativity as being akin to saying, “I interpret the past lives of marshmallows.” When I think of science, I think of things like galvanic skin responses, double-blind studies, hydrochloric acid, or centrifugal force. I understand that trying to examine some invisible, magical process may come across as a little silly or naïve.

If I am talking to a businessperson, whatever I say will likely sound random. If I say I study “innovation,” they may be initially interested. Once they realize that I cannot guarantee any tangible outcome (such as increased product sales), they will probably lose interest. I sometimes count the minutes until the mild surge of boredom blends with the disappointment on their faces. As a species, we are not great at long-term thinking.

If I am talking to an artist, there may be a different problem. It sounds as though I am using a ruler to measure someone’s dreams. I am less likely to encounter condescension and more likely to stir apprehension. Why would anyone want to study creativity? It may seem like watching a movie being made and then talking to the gaffer, or loving dogs yet feeling a compulsion to look at images of their spleens. Art is about doing, feeling, and caring. How can that be analyzed?

There are many potential issues to explore and questions to discuss. Can we measure creativity? How can creativity lead to specific (if often long-term) benefits? Can the study of creativity deliver practical advice on becoming more creative? Before we can really dive into these or any others, I feel compelled to tackle the deeper, underlying question: “why bother with any of these issues in the first place?” This is another way of referencing what I call the WGASA factor. It is named after a partially true urban legend about the San Diego Wild Animal Park.Footnote ³³ For over thirty years, the zoo had a monorail that enabled visitors to see the entire park. It used to break down nearly as often as Lyle Lanley’s monorails in The Simpsons and was replaced in 2007 by an open-air shuttle. When it debuted, however, it was a pretty big deal. The park asked staffers for input on the name, and a zoo designer named Chuck Faust scribbled down “WGASA” on a suggestion form. He meant it as an acronym for “who gives a shit anyway?” Indeed, what did the name of the monorail matter in the larger scheme of the world? Most of the board members were in the dark as to the acronym’s meaning and felt that it sounded African and exotic. Thus the name was selected. For years, when guests asked, they were told that WGASA stood for “world’s greatest animal show anywhere.”Footnote ³⁴

So there are many WGASA factors to ponder. The larger WGASA is “why be creative” or “why value creativity,” and answering these questions will be the main thrust of the book. But I’ll start with a different one. Why does it matter how creativity is defined? Why can’t we just crack open Webster’s and use whatever it says? Why listen to all these almost scientists?

My answer lies in vegetables. First off, what constitutes a vegetable? You may vaguely remember from your grade school days that a tomato is actually a fruit and not a vegetable. You may not remember that avocados, cucumbers, eggplants, okra, olives, peas, peppers, string beans, and zucchini are also, technically, fruits.Footnote ³⁵ Of course, they are all presumed more generally to be vegetables. Why does it matter? Am I arguing against my own argument (and is that possible)?

There have been times when the definition of a vegetable mattered a great deal. In the early 1980s, under the Reagan presidency, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) tried to relax the regulations around what constituted a vegetable. The proposal never actually suggested that ketchup was a vegetable – it used pickle relish as an example.Footnote ³⁶ Yet the idea that ketchup could be considered a vegetable became a rallying cry for protests. A few decades later, similar ground was revisited when Congress did not allow the USDA to tighten regulations around what constituted a vegetable. As a result, a slice of pizza with the equivalent of two tablespoons of tomato paste continued to count as an actual serving of broccoli.

Playing fast and loose with definitions can have real-life consequences. Childhood obesity has continued to rise. School lunches that are given wide latitude over what counts as a vegetable are not the only reason, but they don’t help. Similarly, having creativity defined as the production of something original and task-appropriate does not magically change anything; but it does go a small way toward disentangling creativity from wild chaos.

From Definitions to Categories

This definition, as mentioned, does not rule out too much. We need to dip a little into theory to sort out some of the rest. Let’s start by thinking about the word love. Make a mental list of whom or what you love (or, hell, write it in the margin; I won’t be offended). When you have rooms filled with people who do this exercise, you get a wide variety of answers. Here are just a few of the ones I have heard from students over the years: myself, my mom, my girlfriend, my sorority sisters, ice cream, Beyoncé, America, UConn.

Now think about creativity. When I talk about creativity, I could intend many different meanings. Do I have in mind a creative genius of the past, such as William Shakespeare? Or maybe someone who is still active (and alive), such as Lin-Manuel Miranda? I could be thinking of an undergraduate in my class, who came up with an example I had never heard before; or else I could recall how my youngest son would make up jokes (when asked what type of cereal he was eating, he said “expired”). Am I thinking of the dynamic exchanges that take place in conversations with my colleagues or my graduate students? Do I picture an artist, a writer, a scientist, a chef, a businessperson, an engineer, or a whittler?

Perhaps I am thinking instead about how people create – that hesitant excitement when you believe you have an idea that no one has thought of before, or the blustering of different ideas that can pour out during brainstorming. It might be a company or an organization, perhaps Pixar or Apple, or at least my image of what their workspace must be like. It could be whatever I imagine a generic creative person might be like (smart? crazy? nice? doomed?). In short, it could be almost anything.

How can a single word have so many possible meanings? If your gut tells you to instantly remember the old story about Alaskan natives having multiple words for snow, I must tell you that the story is untrue. Most sources agree that they most likely have two words for snow.Footnote ³⁷ Alas, there is no easy answer. One method by which we have approached this issue has been to develop many models and organizational systems.

If we want to sort out all the ways in which people think and talk about creativity, we have to go back a long way. Humans across civilizations have talked about these things for millennia. Ancient Greeks, for instance PlatoFootnote ³⁸ and Aristotle,Footnote ³⁹ talked about muses, poetry, and genius. In modern times, the likes of FreudFootnote ⁴⁰ and EinsteinFootnote ⁴¹ weighed in on the matter. But very few actually studied creativity. One of the first was a woman named Laura Chassell. In 1914, at the age of twenty-one, she completed her master’s thesis at Northwestern University in Illinois. She devised some possible measures of originality that she administered to students, along with already established tests of intelligence.Footnote ⁴² Chassell’s creativity assessments were astoundingly prescient, predicting most of the ways in which we currently use them. She published her thesis two years later, before completing a PhD in educational psychology in 1920. Unfortunately Chassell’s accomplishments could not overcome the sexism of the time. Ohio State University hired her husband as a professor, but it allowed her to teach just the occasional class – and even then, only until she became a mother. One of the most brilliant minds in creativity scholarship raised her kids while staying active in women’s rights and helping faculty spouses from other countries. Chassell lived to be 101, still correcting spelling mistakes in her granddaughter’s letters, but largely forgotten in the field.Footnote ⁴³ I hope to give her at least a small measure of the credit she deserves.

Most other studies of creativity in the first half of the twentieth century are not shining examples of science. My personal favorite is a paper that helpfully notes that people who are given a lobotomy become less creative.Footnote ⁴⁴ In 1950, however, there came a turning point at the annual American Psychological Association conference. The president, J. P. Guilford, devoted his spotlighted address to the topic of creativity. He argued there should be more research on creativity (particularly, one assumes, the type that does not require lobotomizing people). At that time, less than one in six hundred published papers involved creativity.Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed, one prominent scholar called the 1940s the “cry in the dark” stage of the research.Footnote ⁴⁶ With Guilford’s endorsement (and his research), studying creativity became less of an embarrassment.

Four Ps

In the decade that followed, many more studies of creativity were published. Although the basic definition of creativity as involving something new and task-appropriate had been proposed, the level of consensus that would eventually come was not there yet. An educator named Mel Rhodes decided to comb through the many books and articles on the topic (he used more than 300 reference cards, which reminds me again that I don’t actually hate my computer). He didn’t end up coming up with a new definition, but he suggested a model for how to approach the study of creativity: the four Ps.Footnote ⁴⁷

Rhodes proposed four main ways of thinking about, or categorizing, creativity:

• Person: Who is creative?

• Process: How (and why) are we creative?

• Product: What is creative?

• Press: In which environments are we creative?

You may wonder why Rhodes did not call “Press” by the simpler and more straightforward name “Environment”; but then you also have to admit that “the four Ps” sounds a lot cooler than “the three Ps and an E.” The four Ps are useful in thinking about creativity. I’ll certainly touch on all of them throughout the book. Although my main emphasis is on “Person,” I’ll spend a full chapter on “Process” and a decent portion of one specifically on “Product.” In the latter half of the book, when I talk about positive outcomes, I’ll highlight the interactions between “Person” and “Press.”

The four Ps are still used by a lot of people today. It does strike me that even the people who study creativity rely a great deal on the tried-and-true. Our definitions go back seventy years; this sixty-year-old model is still dominant; and many of the core concepts we will touch on go back more than fifty years. Even in the world of creativity research there is the appeal of the status quo, existing work, and tradition. I am reminded of when a character in the movie Hannah and Her Sisters mocks a Holocaust documentary in which the usual talking heads discuss how such a tragedy could ever happen: “The reason they can never answer the question ‘How could it possibly happen?’ is that it’s the wrong question,” he says. “Given what people are, the question is ‘Why doesn’t it happen more often?’”Footnote ⁴⁸

It is easy to blame schools for not encouraging more creativity – indeed, apportioning this kind of blame has become a career for some – but it’s important to emphasize that creativity is hard. Forging something new is difficult, even for creativity researchers. Expecting principals, bosses, funders, or any gatekeeper to take a leap of faith in creativity is asking a lot. I am more likely to marvel that creativity ever happens than to criticize those times when it is suppressed or not emphasized.

People have tried to build off the four Ps. For example, several possible additional Ps have been nominated (think of it as creativity’s version of the fifth Beatle). These are Perception,Footnote ⁴⁹ Persuasion,Footnote ⁵⁰ Potential,Footnote ⁵¹ Phases,Footnote ⁵² Propulsion, and Public.Footnote ⁵³ Yet the field tends to stick with the main four Ps, whether from inertia or because the perfect model just happened to have been developed in 1961. My favorite expansion on the four Ps, however, uses a different letter. It emphasizes that, although the four Ps take the perspective of the creator as an individual working alone, we often create collaboratively or in a social context.Footnote ⁵⁴

Five As

Much of the work in this area is by my dear friend Vlad Glăveanu, who has proposed the five As.Footnote ⁵⁵ He recast the Person as “Actor,” the Process as the “Action,” and the Product as “Artifact.” These new categories have similar meanings but incorporate the ideas of other people. An actor is observed, an action can be a joint effort, and an artifact implies that people will interact with it (it may help to imagine Indiana Jones hunting for the lost ark). Glăveanu split Press into two different categories that I will explain in a moment: “Affordances” and “Audience.” All these five concepts are working together at the same time, blipping back and forth like a modem in the 1980s. They are less categories and more an intricate interaction.

Affordances are anything you may need or use to be creative. They can vary widely – an affordance could be a Latin tutor, $500,000, a xylophone, a master’s degree in engineering, or three pounds of custard. An affordance is whatever you have or can access that might give you a leg up on others in being creative. If you stop and think about all your possible affordances, you may already begin to get ideas for new projects. Indeed, it’s one of the strategies I use when I am trying to help a student get an idea for a class project or a research study. What are the random resources that you have access to and most people don’t?

Affordances tend to be material, whereas the audience tends to be social. The audience represents anyone who may interact with your creation. It can include mentors, collaborators, or people who read, watch, or try out an early draft of your creation. It can represent the folks you want to reach, too. You might be creating for your family or friends. Perhaps you are aiming to reach a local community, or the world, or even posterity. Your audience could consist of people who haven’t been born yet.

Maybe you are doing something creative only for yourself. That’s okay. That is still a perfectly good reason to create. I have found that much of what I have written over the course of my career, especially my theories, comes down to three words: it all counts. At this point, if I were delivering a lecture, someone would remind me about the basic repetition or copying, or the lawyer saying “kumquats” for his closing argument. And – okay: it doesn’t all count. But that person is a pain in the ass.

As we are going to see and discuss, creativity is everywhere. It’s found in accounting and data entry and toilet cleaning and anything you might assume is uncreative. Creativity percolates at all levels and through all the domains and types of contributions. It can be the littlest spontaneous bit of wordplay. Glăveanu used to teach at Aalborg University in Denmark. After presenting one day, someone came up to him and said, “You live in Aalborg starting with two As, and you want to add three more.” That quip, that (very) minor witticism – that counts.

In the next chapter we’ll find creativity in the smallest of the small, as I talk about another theory: the four Cs. It is a developmental trajectory that encompasses a wide variety of creators who aim for a wide variety of audiences – including those being creative just for themselves.