Anything Can Happen. And Some of it Will.

For half of my life, I thought I wasn’t creative. I believed I didn’t have what it takes to be creative. I thought creativity just wasn’t in my cards (or DNA), just like blue eyes or being a few inches taller aren’t. Thinking of creativity as a talent only a few people have seemed so natural that it didn’t even bother me.

I was wrong. Here are three things I’ve learned:

1. I was born creative.
2. By the age of 20, I was way less creative than I was as a child.
3. This is reversible.

The fourth thing I’ve learned is that all of the above applies to you, too.

Fact 1: We are all born creative. That’s not an opinion or a feeling. It’s not a believe-in-yourself motivational fluff. It’s a fact backed by research. When George Land and Beth Jarman tested children’s creativity, they found that 98% of five-year-olds scored at the top of NASA’s creativity scale (designed for professional adults, not children). 98% of children were found to be creative geniuses by NASA’s standards. For all practical purposes, this includes you and me. We really are all creative early in our lives.

Fact 2: If you are reading this and you are above the age of 20, chances are you are far less creative than you were as a child. In fact, that was the truly astonishing finding of the same research. Even more troubling is that this decline in our creativity begins as early as age 5. Despite having more raw material to work with and more challenges to solve, we use our innate creative abilities less and less.

Fact 3: This is reversible. Creativity doesn’t decline due to some biological process or diminishing neural capacity. Whatever happens to our creativity is mostly environmental, or, more accurately, cultural. Being creative again — being able to see the world for the playground it is, just like children do — is within reach.

How do we do that? Great question! In short, you have to understand the dynamics that enable creativity. Then you have to relentlessly cultivate them in your life. That’s exactly what I set out to explore in this blog. We are going to explore the work of creative people, analyze seemingly random acts of creativity, and roll up our sleeves and be creative. For real.

Will it be easy? Sometimes. Will it be fun? Most of the time. If you let it.

But there’s one question we need to consider before we begin: Why bother? Why is it essential (even life-changing) to be creative? The answer is in the title of this post. When you are creative, anything can happen. And some of it will.

Here’s what Claude (my favorite AI chatbot) said when I asked him what it “thinks” about this title: It is part cliché and part overpromising. It sounds like a guru-ish self-help mantra: generically true in a way that cannot be refuted but doesn’t help much. In theory, anything can happen, and statistically, some of it will. This title, said my artificial editor, is anything but creative.

Why am I writing about human creativity but talking with Claude about it? We’ll get to that, I promise, but not today. The point is that Claude was right. Or at least not entirely wrong. The title of this post does sound like a cliché. It does sound like something a self-declared self-help guru would say. What Claude was missing, though, is that this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not valid or worth discussing. Some clichés are so widely used that we don’t bother to think about what they can teach us. They’ve become clichés for a reason, and sometimes there’s value in recalling this reason and acknowledging its impact. Some words can change our lives, even if they sound like clichés. And yes, this was yet another cliché.

But here’s what matters: even though anything can happen, it won’t happen to you. Or it will happen, and you won’t notice it. Or you will notice it for a brief moment and think nothing of it. Unless you are leading a creative life.

Leading a creative life is treating everything as an experience. It’s observing the world with a sense of exploration. Being creative requires you to both marvel at and question things simultaneously. It’s more than merely connecting the dots: it’s an act of alchemy. Creativity helps us reshape reality, first in our minds and then in the external world. Being creative means playing constantly, regardless of context. It means to never stop evolving.

That’s a lot to take in. On first read, this list sounds as abstract and vague as the term creativity itself. Luckily, when you break down creativity into these seven core functions, you realize there are simple, fun, everyday things you can do to increase the chances of new ideas emerging. Creativity is not a process that delivers predefined outcomes. It’s a system that creates the conditions for amazing things to happen.

When you lead a creative life, the cliché becomes reality: anything can happen. And when anything can happen, some of it will.