DAY TWENTY SEVEN

What is the more difficult, having the idea or executing it?

This has been on my mind following something I saw on social media, more accurately, someone. 

 

I tend to consider myself as fairly inventive, not short of an idea or two. For many years I used to think my only real ability was to make connections between disparate thoughts and ideas to come up with new angles and approaches, usually in order to address old and longstanding problems. It was an applied use of creativity so to speak. As I wrote in the first post here I made this aspect of creativity something of a career. 

As a senior manager and a consultant this led to me often being quite dismissive about the ability to have ideas and be creative in the abstract, convinced as I was that such ideas were ten-a-penny and that being able to deliver an idea in a given organisational, cultural or financial context was more important in the final analysis. Indeed, being truly creative was about solving all those constraints and contradications and still coming up with something workable in my book. That may well be true in many work situations, and in general I still lean towards creativity as a tool with which one solves problems rather than something one uses to express something abstract, a feeling or an emotion say, or simply to create joy, delight, inspiration, and all the other things which make us human.

In taking this problem-solving approach there may well have been, (and may still well be in respect of this blog and how it is not fulfilling its original purpose of inspiring me to make more things), some self-serving slight of hand going on: I find ideas easy things to work with, whereas execution requires far more effort and commitment. 

Here's where the social media person comes in. 

I happened to be on a site that is chockful of artists, weavers, knitters, photographers and all sorts of crafts people, most of them skilled hobbyists rather than professional. Some of the work is of incredible quality and clearly the result of many hours of practice and execution. But at the same time the pieces on display are for the most part clearly what they are meant to be - a pair of socks, a blanket, a well executed picture of a landscape and so on. They are superb examples of a known and recognisable thing.

And then there was this other person. The piece which caught my eye was a bookend made out of  Star Wars figurines, stones from their garden, and modelling clay. It was a miniature diorama. There were several other pieces all displaying the same kind of approach, basically taking found objects and putting them together in a (to me) surprising way and making some practical use of them. 

The approach struck me as an almost exact analogue of how I used to think about creativity in ideas, the bringing together of disparate things to make another thing from them. Even more, (well, shocking is the right word for the experience), was that there seemed to be an almost free-flowing inventiveness going on in this person's mind. No two objects were the same, all kinds of techniques and materials were used, there was no obvious style or approach that they had found and stuck to, as is the way with most craftspeople and makers of all kinds.

In short, seeing this work made me wonder whether I had any reason to consider myself a creative person at all, especially allowing for the fact that I define my creativity as about the quality and frequency of ideas, rather less about the execution or some abstract emotion. I can easily live with other people being more skilled in the execution of something, but to be massively over matched by another person's inventiveness has certainly given me pause for thought. The question is not about being more or less creative or inventive than another - a fairly sterile and pointless comparison - but about one's self-identity.

 

Onwards...pensively. 

Picture Credit: Nutsinee Kijbunchoo. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/user:Nkij Creative Commons. Attribution 4.0 International