Everyone is creative. Throughout my creative agency career, it’s a truism I’ve gone along with. But now I want to confess that I disagree.
Search Amazon and you’ll find that Everyone Is Creative is the title of several self-help guides, in which the authors claim that everyone is born creative, and pose the question “have you ever met a child who wasn’t creative?” I have. Me.
Chapter Two of the first self-help guide I came across instructs me to embrace my own innate creativity but I’m not sure I have any. I’ve never felt creative. I don’t do creative. I don’t get the urge to doodle, craft or invent. And though at one time this felt like admission of failure in an industry where creativity is bought and sold for millions, it’s now time to come clean.
Of course, I understand the benefits of the creative act. I love songs and films and fashion. Yes, I envy people who can paint or draw or write. I wish I had the talent to do the same.
What’s more, I run a creative agency. So I’ve hired dozens of creatives, designers, creative strategists, creative project managers, creative account directors. I know their talents and the premium we place on them.
And we are not alone. Our economy is buoyed by 2.4 million creative industry workers, defined by government as working in “those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. Together, we are a 21st-century industrial powerhouse.
But then again, one of those 2.4 million jobs must be my own and – I don’t know if I mentioned this yet – I am not creative. Not at all.
The first time I really questioned my lack of creativity was on day one of my agency career. I was dropped in at the deep end, joining a brainstorming meeting with our founder and an angry client impatient for his problems to be solved – it was intense to say the least. No stranger to project and account management, but new to what this meant in the context of a creative agency, I was in awe of the result, a fizz and buzz of energy and ideas. I couldn’t tell where those ideas were coming from or how they came to the surface, they just came. Creativity seemed like a code I needed to crack.
Later, I managed creative teams who worked in similarly mysterious ways. Where I love the reliability of clear structures and systems, they seemed to thrive on chaos and uncertainty – the student syndrome of ideas coming at the last minute. As an account director, I’d be across all projects and deadlines, managing the clients’ expectations and relationships. I’d ask the team “how’s it going?”, get a non-committal response, give them their headspace and hope like hell the creative muse was likely to strike before our deadline. I trusted the team, but goodness it made me so uncomfortable!
