Given this three word title, can you write a creative story from it? So you graduated Phi Beta Kappa from a top college, what will you do with the octopus's sneakers?
The cognitive psychologist Robert Sternberg knows all about "IQ intelligence," the so-called analytic skills, but he's a lot more interested in the practical and creative stuff. Most of us who've been around the barn know that book smarts is not enough once you graduate. As Sternberg has found, it takes different stuff to enter a party where you don't know a soul, discuss what share of the rent is fair for each of your roommates, and write a letter of recommendation for someone you don't know very well.
Your SAT was nearly 1400 and, as expected you had a very successful academic experience in college. Now you're on the job in marketing working with a lot of ambiguity and your creative brain is at a dead-end. The juices aren't flowing. There was no college course in creativity and your timelines are scarier than hell. Sternberg is also very interested in that third kind of intelligence, "creative intelligence."
Creative intelligence is the ability to create, invent, or imagine something. He measures creative intelligence by, for example, giving people a title such as "The Octopus's Sneakers" and asking them to write a story about it. Or, he'll have you look at a sequence of pictures and tell a story about one of them, or even develop an advertisement for a new product.
Rewrite creativity. It's not at all what most of us think. The notion that some people are born creative geniuses of a unique stripe is pretty firmly entrenched. I suspect it's appealing to think that some people are innately creative, then maybe that will let the rest of us off the hook. That way businesses can make creativity just a recruiting challenge. Under my breath, I'd say that it also makes for a small number of jerks. Having consulted at leading advertising agencies, I've mused over how some "creatives" expect to be treated. Not a pretty sight. Especially when it's balderdash.
Growing up in the music business, I've got zero patience for treating some artists as unbelievably creative. Thankfully, there weren't too many in college, but I remember how some ordinary folk really wanted to make space for the "artists" to act out. So I laughed out loud to read an interview of the great American dancer, Twyla Tharp, in which she said that if you wanted to be creative, you'd better get busy copying others. Hmmmm. Now that's a radical idea.
Here are some more radical ideas. In my book, Brainware, one of the important points that I make about creativity is that it may not be easy, but it's doable. Creativity is a learned competency just as Tharp suggested. Furthermore, although it's a painful trial and error process, it's also been mapped out. Top companies have creativity and innovation laid out in some very specific processes. The big truth about creativity is that at its heart, it's a contact sport.
Can you write a story about the octopus's sneakers? Better check out your network for some help.