To Be Creative, You Need To Be Curious

Andrew Weir | AI Generated

I previously discussed the importance — and prevalence — of creativity to the human condition. I assured you that creativity is a learnable, trainable skill.

So, how does one learn to be more creative? 

I’m not here to tell you, exactly. I’m not here to give a strict schedule to follow to “unlock your creative process” or some such nonsense. But nor am I here to tell you to submit yourself completely to the whims of “inspiration.”

If you’re genuinely serious about learning to be more creative, you really only need two things: curiosity and playfulness. Today, we’ll focus on curiosity.

Curiosity sets the stage for creativity. “Creativity,” as we think of it and as we defined it previously, is just the result of different, single ideas or facts or bits of wisdom bumping into each other. 

Think of it scientifically, like a closed environment filled with gaseous atoms or perhaps a beaker with a saturated solution. The particles within those environments move around, collide with each other, form new bonds and make new molecules. The more particles you have in that closed environment, the more likely you are to get them to, you know, do that.

For our purposes here, our brains are the closed environment. If you don’t have a critical mass of ideas or facts or bits of wisdom to bump into other ones, it’s difficult to make that happen in any sort of organic way. Sure, I suppose you could forcibly introduce the only two notions you have, Hadron Collider-style, but it’s unlikely to produce the sort of results you want. Or even to work at all.

So you need to know things, understand things, have experienced things. Across a variety of subjects and disciplines. This creates a mental environment that allows ideas that normally would not meet to do so, get to know each other, fall in love and have little babies. And being curious about the world and other people and yourself is the way to do that.

Curiosity, in itself, can’t be faked. But it can be encouraged. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about the merits of broad-based, self-directed learning. It’s no secret that everyone learns better, faster, and more effectively when they are interested in what they’re studying. And while we could get into the merits of edutainment or pop culture hooks or multi-discipline project-based learning, that’s not really the point of this particular blog post.

Think of curiosity as a flower. Some flowers are more resilient than others. Some require very specific conditions to grow and flourish, and they wilt very quickly outside of them. Some defiantly persist, even in the cracks of a sidewalk. Everyone starts with a different species of curiosity-flower, but we all have one.

We can see it in babies, as they insatiably soak in the details of this new world they’ve found themselves in. We see it in small children, in their constant explorations and demands of “Why?” and “How?” But somewhere along the line, many young people seem to lose that wild impulse that drives them to go and find out. Their curiosity-flowers have wilted. Or, at the very least, been confined to window-boxes.

It isn’t because humans naturally lose our curiosity as we age. It comes down to what and how we are taught. Have you ever been told that curiosity killed the cat? I certainly was, and more than once. It was kindly meant, intended to keep me physically safe, but the underlying lesson in the adage, as it’s usually used, is that curiosity itself can hurt us.

Our early education — all the things we learn, both in and out of a classroom — has a huge impact on how we look at the world and ourselves. And it is often filled with warnings and limitations. We’re presented lessons in tidy subject-bound boxes, as though mathematics never had anything to do with philosophy or history with science. We’re warned that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And that’s true, so far as it goes, but instead of an encouragement to learn more, it’s taken as a directive to not learn at all.

Stay in your lane. Focus on what’s in front of you. Maintain the current scope.

This guidance is useful, but only situationally. And applied without situational consideration, it reinforces the understanding that learning and knowledge and experience ought only to exist in neat, orderly, pre-defined spaces. It makes a mental environment of planter boxes and walled-off greenhouses instead of wild fields and blossoming meadows. Useful for focused and specific cultivation, but less so for stumbling across something genuinely new or interesting.

Curiosity is how we seed our mental soil. Or super-saturate our solutions, if you prefer. It’s how we collect all the disparate ideas inside our heads so that we can get them to bump into each other and make something new (or, at the very least, new to us). A genuinely liberal education, broad-based instead of tightly focused, can help those curiosity-flowers we’re all born with stay healthy and vibrant.

Curiosity is how we feed our creativity. How we activate that creativity, inject the energy necessary for the reactions, will be the subject of my next post.