What is creativity? Definitions
Have you ever had a moment where suddenly an idea appears that blows your mind?
One night, I am sleeping and a rush of images and words, one after the other, wakes me up. The visions are obvious. Surprised with I had just witnessed, I stand up, I tried to be silent as a ninja, so I do not wake my wife up, and I leave the bedroom. I go to my desk, sit on my chair and I start writing in my notebook:
Hipotecas (mortgages in Spanish)
Hipos (short for hippopotamus)
Hipos.com
And I sketched the following page:
Where does all this information come from? It was the year 2010. In those days, I was fully involved in the business world. I had already ventured in three different companies as co-founder, and I was working as an intrapreneur in the largest housing developer in Latam. At that time, I was thinking of how to revolutionize the Mexican financial market by providing users with transparency and helping them to make wiser decisions regarding financial products. Having experience with mortgage brokerage and real estate development, I noticed how many people bought their house or condo without being fully aware of the terms of the mortgage product that they signed and with a 13% annual interest rate is not a joke.
Weeks passed, and I explored playfully with the notes that I wrote, and in that way, I developed the copy for the launch campaign:
"Una hipoteca no es un hipopótamo karateca." In English, it says something like this: "A mortgage is not a hippopotamus doing karate."
The message was clearly expected to be funny, or light, at least in Spanish it makes sense. Taking away all tightness in which banks communicated their messages to Mexican clients.
What this idea a milestone in my life? hipos.com was born a year later, reached 200,000 organic visitors per month, and died when I came to live in Barcelona four years later.
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Good ideas can pop-up from our mind when you least expect it. So it is essential that we learn to view or listen to them, and to design a method to materialize them and to make them work. To help you to understand more about creativity, I have selected some definitions that I found interesting:
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines creativity as "the ability to create" and "the quality of being creative."
Phil Beadle, one of the most well-known and experienced keynote speakers of the UK, says in his books Rules for Mavericks that "creativity is often seen as being solely the process of coming up with a reasonable enough, original enough idea, and is viewed by many as entirely synonymous with imagination".
James Webb Young, the author of the excellent book A Technique for Producing Ideas, presents some of the fundamentals aspects of creativity such as "an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements" and "the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships".
Ken Robinson, one of the most influential voices worldwide in education, in his book Creative Schools that creativity is "the process of having original ideas that have value." Robinson points out that there are two key concepts to have in mind: imagination and creativity: "imagination is the root of creativity, the ability to think things that are not present in our senses." Creativity is "making your imagination work."
Reflecting on my own experience while creating hipos.com, I realized that one of my main errors was during the execution of the idea, not as much as having a wrong idea because it had a lot of potentials. In this sense, as Beadle affirms in his previously mentioned book, creativity is a two-step process in which idea creation is the most simple. The most complicated part is the construction, "the part that actually involves effort and perhaps even discipline - that part separates the dreamer from the achiever." Here it is the key to success…
