The Creative Process Isn’t Magical It’s About Care And Consideration

For non-creative types, the mythic inventor or fountain of wisdom might sound romantic and alluring but it’s hardly ever the case. Real creativity isn’t about mysterious forces and divine insight handed down from aliens, angels, or archons. No, it’s the normal workings of the brain when a problem is provided and its solution is something you care about. We imagine the lone genius struck by lightning-bolt inspiration, but in truth most breakthroughs look more like patient gardening than divine revelation. When we see a clever solution to a problem, we can often be amazed at how simple or ingenious, or how magical the process may seem. It all depends on the level of understanding required to appreciate how it works. Yet even the simplest solutions seem to evade us until they’re pointed out. It requires an element of imagination to see things in a new light, and that’s something we all have. So, if we learn what happens in the creative mind, we are in a better place to emulate that and think of solutions for ourselves.  
 
The creative process is the central mechanism in the act of creativity, the person and the product are on either side of this fundamental dynamic. If you care about finding a solution or achieving something that you desire, then you’ll be in good stead to be the creative person. Next, you have you apply what you know to the problem. By learning about what you’re trying to achieve, you populate your mind with relevant and associated wisdom. It's rare to find a solution straight away, often all kinds of things influence you in the beginning and it’s like finding a path through a new forest. As you learn the trees, the lighting, the sounds, things start to become clearer.  
 
Often the time comes when you have to take a break. We can’t dedicate ourselves to solving little problems all the time, often we’re left wondering what time it is and realise we’ve a thousand jobs to take care of.  When our conscious awareness is no longer focused on the issue at hand, the information we learned becomes processed and gradually taken up into long-term memory. It’s at this stage where our subconscious mind takes over and begins assimilating this wisdom into the context of our problem. Because we can’t see this process directly, if often seems mystical or magical. In fact, it’s normal behaviour. 
 
What happens in the mind when we learn information and use it to solve a new problem? We use the information gathered, often in a completely unrelated context, and reframe it using our own perspective. This often provides brand-new insights and offers patterns and statistical behaviours that were so-far unnoticed. By re-arranging what we know about the natural world and the invented world simultaneously, we can use invention and nature together to form new and valuable products or ideas. We learn new wisdom about the world when we look again at data with a new set of eyes and a different angle of understanding. 
 
As our control agenda, or the initial problem, fades into passive attention when we go about our normal lives, the interest we discovered in the associated data remains. This encourages us to still research and learn on the concepts even when we may not care so much about our initial desire or idea. As we increase our body of knowledge on the topics, we build an ever-clearer picture of what we are learning about. Eventually, something might click in the mind where all the data begins to point to something we can use, something of value to us.  
 
Every generation has had its own problems to solve, and the data collected by the previous generation to work with. As we can only assess creativity by product when it comes to historical activities, like inventing the wheel, the brick wall, the bow and arrow, we can delve a lot more deeply into the creative processes of post-industrial thinkers. Self-reporting has been an integral part of scientific thought, as the process must be repeatable and transparent. However, when self-reporting, inventors and creative people might not be aware of their subconscious processes or little influences and so ascribe everything to strange power, cleverness, or some other non-scientific explanation. 
 
Creativity isn’t a lightning strike from the heavens, it’s the slow, attentive weaving of what we know, what we notice, and what we care about. With the right surroundings, the right companions, and the willingness to keep looking again, each of us can create something of value. That value need not be measured in millions; sometimes the most transformative act is simply caring enough to make the world a little better.  

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