Our research lab and I dug into the science of creativity recently. We looked at data from 3,841 people across ten areas, like music, writing, and science.
This finding was pretty fascinating:
Being creative at one thing does not make you creative at others. You would think it does - if someone’s a super-talented artist, you’d expect some of it to transfer over to another discipline. But it doesn’t.
In the data, someone could be a brilliant musician and a completely terrible cook, and a talented painter was no more creative at science than someone who can’t draw at all.
So when we call someone “a creative person,” what we really mean is that they’re creative at one or two particular things. That goes for everyone, including some of us who decided we weren’t “creative” because we sucked at artistic stuff!
One more thing this tells us is the secret to getting more creative. Go deeper, not wider. The more you know a subject, the more “creative” you’ll be, because you notice what could be done differently in it.
All of our findings went into the newest thing from our research lab: a science-backed creativity test. It takes ~2 minutes, it’s free, and I think the science behind it is pretty novel: coached.com/creativity-test
Do me a favor: if you find it interesting, share it with someone or with your network. It took the team a lot of effort and we’re releasing all of it to the public for free, so we’d really appreciate the share!
