What is creativity? Definitions
Have you ever had a moment where an idea suddenly blows your mind?
One night, I am sleeping, and a rush of images and words wakes me up one after the other. The visions are apparent. 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 into three different companies as a 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 make wiser financial product decisions. 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 mortgage product terms they signed. With a 13% annual interest rate, it 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 expected to be funny, or light, at least in Spanish it makes sense. Taking away all the tightness with which banks communicated their messages to Mexican clients.
What is this idea? Is it 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.
Good ideas can pop up from our minds when we least expect them. So, we must 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 in the UK, says in his book 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 fundamental 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, states in his book Creative Schools that creativity is "the process of having original ideas that have value." Robinson points out two key concepts 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 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 potential. In this sense, as Beadle affirms in his book, creativity is a two-step process in which idea creation is the simplest. 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…
