6 Reasons Why It Is So Important To Be Creative

One of the smartest people to ever walk the planet knew the importance of creativity.

Humans have long expressed their creativity. We are the only truly imaginative species. Our ability to take in what is around us, and to then think and respond with something new is truly magical.

We have built a world around us that all comes from our unique ability to create. Every day, we see wonderfully creative people coming up with novel ways to look at something different.

We can be either artistic with our creativity, expressive in our emotions, or innovative in our problem solving.

We see what happens to people when we don’t create. We tend to destroy instead. When power, money, and greed take over our need to create it becomes a destructive force (creativity is still used, but in ways that are led to manipulation and control).

However, most of us simply create to feed our souls and to express ourselves and our thoughts in original ways.

Lost souls don’t come from a lack of ability to survive, they come from a lack of meaning or purpose to thrive (to wake up in the morning and feel alive because you are going to create something in the world around you today).

This alone shows why it is fundamentally important not to lose our creative edge in life, but there’s other benefits.

The benefits of being creative each day

While there are also some disadvantages to having a creative mind (such as being too easily distracted by new ideas and feeling like you aren’t making headway in life), the benefits far outweigh those disadvantages.

Here’s 6 particular advantages towards being creative:

1) You Deal With Changes And Uncertainty Better

When you are creative you don’t see problems as something that has pushed you off your perch, you see them as something you can fix and grow from. You see them as a challenge to embrace. An opportunity even to find a way around obstacles.

The more someone is used to the unknown the less it frightens them. When a change is forced on people then they might panic if it’s so different from what they were used to.

A routine suddenly disrupted leaves those who aren’t agile to feel lost, but a creative person is likely to be more adaptable because they are used to changing things up more often anyway – they often have to create change to provoke and spark their creativity.

It’s been known that creative people tend to like their time alone, free of distractions. They don’t see isolation as a threat to their existence but as an opportunity to explore their mind further.

Why this is important in our future – Life is uncertain. Our future is likely to need more adaptable people as disruption becomes more commonplace and changes occur more often and quicker.

2) You Become A Better Problem-Solver

You don’t just solve work problems, you solve life problems.

When you are seeking to create solutions you get over the hurdles and fears that would otherwise hold you back and keep you from reaching further goals in life, which would then have a knock-on effect of making you less content or happy in life.

You can develop a stronger vision of what you need and what the world needs.

We have certainly created many inventions and industries over the years that were usually in good intention but which developed problems of their own. Yet, with our creative minds, we are able to solve those problems and continuously seek to improve ourselves and our planet.

The fact is, our world is becoming more and more complex every day. If you looked at the internet today there would be millions more content on there than the previous day. The more we add to our world the more our brains have to figure out how to process and filter.

Our logic certainly helps here too, but with creativity comes an ability to solve more complex problems that arise. The more complex the problem the fewer examples there are before in how to solve them, so we need to enhance our creative problem-solving capabilities to do so.

Without creativity you do not discover new solutions to complex problems, you struggle to come up with new solutions at all, and most likely fall back into old habits and solutions which don’t work anymore.

Creativity is not just expressive or fancy aesthetics in business, it is paramount towards taking a business forward.

In our personal lives, it allows us to look at problems in our life with a fresh perspective, making us less biased or likely to be too stubborn to change.

Why this is important in our future – Creativity and critical thinking will be two of the most important skills to possess when AI impacts many logical systematic jobs, and when we need to solve more complex problems computers can’t.

3) Your Mind Keeps Flowing And Your Fluid Intelligence Improves

Take this study on twins.

One twin was an avid writer. He wasn’t just journaling, but he was creating stories and expressing himself with his words. The other twin had no creative output, he found work in a factory repeating a lot of the same tasks. They took a brain scan of the twins through a 10 year period and the differences in their creative regions were vastly different, and the twin who wrote creative stories performed far better at problem-solving tasks.

The more you seek to keep your neurons firing the more electrical connections you create. This has a spiraling effect in helping you create more.

Just think about when you started reading a book.

At first, you might struggle to get going but when you get into the flow you don’t just read quicker, but your imagination starts placing you in the realms of the story you are reading (like you are there in it).

Your fluid intelligence is important, especially as you age, as it allows you to think of different solutions to novel problems. The older you get the more you seem to lose it, generally because life becomes rather mundane and routine when your responsibilities add up (which is why it’s even more important to feed your creativity as you age).

Why this is important in our future – We may live in a world where technology and AI makes life so easy that we simply don’t engineer many new thoughts for ourselves anymore. It’s important to keep our minds ticking.

4) You Envision What You Want (And Don’t Want) In Life

You see the big picture better.

When you do so, you are able to make better decisions on what you are going to do each day. Your creativity in seeing the big picture, and in trusting your gut instinct, can guide your logic to make good decisions.

Too often, our logic controls our creativity. It decides when to turn it on and off, and often it switches our creativity off in order to keep us safe, but when our creativity is allowed to flow it can envision what we really desire and want in life much more accurately than our logic.

Our logic is the sensible doer, our creativity is the dreamer. If we can get our logic and creativity to see eye-to-eye then we can envision the big picture, but know when to actively take steps and actions towards that vision.

Why this is important in our future – This is important now and in the future. We get one shot at life so to go through it not having your own goals and dreams just means life will be played out for you rather than you going after what you want.

5) You Find More Connections With Other’s As You Co-Create More

We all want to be creative, and we all are underneath. We may have been told as children that creativity is just something for the select few, but we can all be creative in our lives.

As children, we all were naturally so, and we can be again, it’s just that often our upbringing and our work paths have led towards those muscles not been flexed so much, whilst logic and fear became dominant.

It’s no wonder how people end up idolizing creative celebrities for their art and endeavor (even if being drawn into this popularity-era influencer mindset is incredibly bad for us). They think they must have a gift, but the truth is, it’s a gift we all have.

We don’t need to express our creativity just in arts (there are many profound ways we can be creative), and we find our creativity blossoms when we surround ourselves with other people who have different thoughts and a diversity of interests.

Creativity brings us together through co-creation (yes, this can be when businesses work with consumers rather than for them, but also in how people collectively create together in life too). We develop new solutions we wouldn’t have thought of on our own. We come up with much grander solutions when we co-create.

We also learn to connect with people in more profound ways when we are open and creative together.

Why this is important in our future – Our human connection is more important than ever the more diverse and interconnected our world becomes.

6) You Become Happier On The Whole, As Life Becomes More Interesting And Fulfilling

It’s subjective to say being creative makes you happier, but studies suggest that when someone tries to do something new they fire new electrical connections around their brain which then releases more dopamine.

It explains why you can see creative people happily writing, playing instruments, or painting for hours on end (they only become unhappy when they stop or have to attach external value to their craft).

If we were to give just a small fraction of our day to add a bit more creative exploration to our day we would likely fall asleep on that happier, as we have stretched ourselves to new endeavours. This can be in an artistic sense though drawing, through articulating new forms of words, or through solving a problem. The more we vary our creative output the better.

As children, we grow up and have dreams. We visualize changing the world, making a difference, just being happy. Almost all human beings share that same desire (it’s just life expectation, struggle, and desperation that tend to get in the way sometimes – we need to listen to the child-within more to overcome our adult baggage, and memories can help enhance our creativity to help do so).

When we bring out our creativity again we feel that spark, that desire, that motivation to make something in our day great.

When we do, when we are allowing ourselves to be creative in life, even just in small doses, we tend to feel so much happier (when we have lost that creative spark we tend to fall into a routine of existence and worry – we wonder how to survive rather than how to live).

We become more productive and wake up with more urgency in life. It can lead us to different opportunities too as we are more likely to want to try new things and connect with different people.

When we are creative our life is certainly more interesting for it.

Why this is important in our future – We are likely to have even more interesting concepts and experiences in our world as we find more time to ourselves, and life is too short not to seek to enjoy it.