Creativity

I'm going to talk about myself for a bit, since that's what I get to observe, but I'm trying to get to a broader point not just spout off about myself.

I feel like there's a "traditional" image of the path to creativity. A bunch of somewhat wacky looking people tossing a ball around while brainstorming in an office shaped like a castle or sitting in a hot springs on some company retreat (ok, maybe that's several images all jammed together). And part of the image is that those people are part of some cross disciplinary team or each has some broad range of work and life experiences. Think of the creativity posters with pictures of an old Einstein with crazy hair.

I've filled several invention disclosures at work. Some of which are working through the process to become patents. I'll admit that while each to the best of my knowledge is an original and useful idea, none of them is going to transform an industry or anything close to that. But I like to think that to have an original useful idea in a field that has been around a while and has a decent amount of competition takes some creativity.

I was thinking about what lead up to each of these inventions. Since I've never been to a meeting where a ball was tossed around and definitely never been to a company retreat with hot springs none of those were involved in the process. In fact the common theme in each case is either independently or in collaboration with one or two other coworkers I was digging deeply into the details of some aspect of a circuit I was working on. And in each case as I reached a certain level of discovery and understanding the new idea just flowed. And it was a single clear idea, not a giant list of brainstormed ideas. Each of these situations seemed almost the exact opposite of the "traditional" image of creativity.

Going back to Einstein for a moment. The old man with crazy hair really didn't do much. It was when he was a clean cut, suit wearing, patent clerk that he came up with mind blowing advances in physics. I will admit that I don't know a ton about Einstein, but my understanding is that most of his advancements came from thought experiments on his own, not brainstorming or even collaboration.

For my own example I wonder if while I'm being creative, maybe I'm not hitting a higher level of creativity that the "traditional" example would help me achieve. The higher level could be just how new the idea is, or could be the difference between creativity on the level of circuit details vs large system changes. However, that doesn't hold together when the Einstein example is considered.

I guess the answer is probably just that creativity is a large, poorly defined concept so different types of creativity require different approaches. And different people get to creativity by different means. In addition, crazy looking Einstein makes a better poster and a multidisciplinary teams going rafting makes a better story than an engineer focusing on a computer screen late at night. So those are the images of creativity that are spread.

Was that obvious? Is there something I missed? Am I over valuing engineering creativity - is a pixar writer so much more creative than a chip designer that the comparison doesn't even make sense? Does a pixar writer actually follow the "traditional" path or is that just a false image? Is "traditional" path really more about how to get a team to collaborate than how to maximize individual creativity?

Most of my random ramblings are just that. But in this case I'm actually reevaluating which assignments at work I want based on this idea. The "traditional" image of creativity that I have says bounce from area to area picking up broad knowledge to allow cross-pollination of ideas. But now I'm thinking that while breadth shouldn't be ignored, my own path to creativity is to go further in depth.