A few days ago, my boyfriend sent me a link to a video he said I absolutely had to watch. He first saw it in a seminar at work.
The short video introduces viewers to Dewitt Jones, a National Geographic photographer, who shares some of his thoughts on creativity and, essentially, everyday life.
In the video, he talks about a key lesson he’s learned: There are amazing things for all of us to see every single day. Whether we actually see these remarkable things depends on our perspective, or as Jones says, on our ability to be creative.
We all have the ability to be creative, he says.
I’ve talked before about creativity and about connecting to my own creativity on my body image blog, Weightless. (Many fantastic bloggers talked about it too.) I’ve said that creativity is inside all of us. That it’s not just in our brains, but also in our bones. In our souls. In our spirits.
Creativity can be in everything we do from pouring our coffee in the morning to taking a walk at lunch, to playing a game with the kids, to cooking dinner, to writing a two-line poem before bed.
But how do we access our creativity, Jones wonders. “How do we bring it out every day in everything we do?”
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I am surprised that so few discussions of creativity have nothing to say about what is meant by the term. So, thanks for asking. Creativity is a judgement call, and that makes all the difference. What appears to be creative to one person may be routine to another.
What does this have to do with your post and Jones’ video. Both of you put the seat of creativity in mindfulness. So, anyone, simply by being mindful, can be creative. To me, the seat of creativity is knowledge, much of it unconscious. So, Jones’ genius is not so much in the mindfulness that leads him to select lenses carefully, but rather his knowledge of the potentialities of different lenses (i.,e, perspectives). A novice photographer could switch lenses all day long and never get the shots like Jones’. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, is a good popular treatment of the role of expertise in creativity.
There may be many ways to succeed, as Jones’ suggests, but none of them comes without practice and lots of it.