Can you teach yourself to be creative?

For every piece of art, be it a painting, a film or theatre I've seen and thought, "that's bloody amazing" there's an equal amount of work I've looked at and the small angry voice in my head has said, "I could have done that."

But then a third, more reasonable voice comes in and says, "ah yes but they're out there, being creative." Once I'd gotten over the multitude of voices living inside my head, I decided to take a look at creativity, what it's all about, and most importantly, whether it's something that can be taught. An emphatic 'yes' says psychologist Mark Runco, a cognitive psychologist who studies creativity at the University of Georgia. The trick is to break it down into chunks.

You create now 🧑‍🎨

Creativity, like most things, gets better with practice, Runco says. The more you do it, the more defined and stronger it becomes. The key is breaking the idea of being creative down into four steps.

Preparation: This is about knowing the world you're trying to be creative in. For a painter, they need to understand colour and form. Composers, meanwhile, need to know how to read music. So if there's a world you're trying to become more creative in, start learning that world.

Incubation: This is when you let your brain kick around something for a while, allowing the problem to bump into other ideas to combine in (hopefully) interesting ways.

Illumination: When those ideas have bumped together in just the right way, you get your eureka moment. Well, sort of. The initial moment of illumination is like a version of the final idea you'll have. It's like seeing a path. You don't know what's at the end of it until you follow it.

Verification:  Once you've formulated that idea, it's all about releasing it into the world to see if it really is a good idea as you thought it was.

If this all sounds a bit abstract and out there, Check out Everything is a Remix, it's a three-part video series that shows you how some of the greatest creators out there have all gone through this very similar experience.

So the next time you see something you think you could do better, go out and prove it!