Creativity is an engine of life, which supplies power to drive forward.

• Anybody can play weird, that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple—awesomely simple—that’s creativity. [Charles Mingus]
• Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. [widely attributed to Erich Fromm]
• Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way. [Edward de Bono]

Humans did not invent the concept of round but many thousands of years ago, they created wheels. People did not create fire but we have found ways to create fires. One discovery led to another, and eventually people were driving automobiles and piloting spaceships. Every innovation, including the computer chip, has been a product of creativity. Creativity is essential to science and art. It spawns technologies, and “is a vital skill for the future of work”.

The subject of creativity has generated extensive research and vast bodies of scholarship. The point of this essay is not to make you an expert on the subject of creativity – though you could become an expert on creativity if you followed and studied all of the linked literature in this section – but to point out its essential role in human life as we know it, and present an overview of creativity.

“Creativity is a complex, multi-faceted concept encompassing a variety of related aspects, abilities, properties and behaviours.” Though no consensus definition has emerged, probably owing to its complexity, “there seems to be general agreement that creativity involves the production of novel and useful ideas and products”. “The standard definition is bipartite: Creativity requires both originality and effectiveness.” Beyond that, creativity has been defined, among other ways, as:

• “the capability to catch original and valuable ideas and solutions”;
• “a process from the decision to be creative to idea generation and evaluation to product completion”;
• “the capability or act of conceiving something original or unusual”;
• “the interaction among aptitude, process, and environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined in a certain social context”;
• “a process that leads to a novel and useful outcome (an idea, product, or expression)”;
• “internal attention constrained by a generative goal”;
• “the ability to generate novel associations that are adaptive in some way”;
• “a dynamic interplay between the brain’s memory and control systems”;
• “optimal novelty and maximal positive effect”.

“Creativity is related to both cognition and emotion, which are the two major mental processes, interacting with each other to form psychological processes.” Theories about creativity fall into these categories:

• Developmental theories of creativity explore how creativity develops over a lifetime;
• Psychometric theories focus on cognitive abilities;
• Economic theories analyze the economic drivers behind creativity;
• Stage and componential process theory holds that creativity arises from expertise, cognitive ability, and motivation;
• Cognitive theories focus on the mental operations of creativity;
• Problem-solving theory focuses on divergence and convergence in solving problems;
• Problem-finding focuses on finding problems instead of drawing conclusions too quickly;
• Evolutionary (see also here) models analyze creativity’s roots in our evolutionary history;
• Typological models categorize creativity based on certain characteristics; and
• Systems: “The Systems Model argues that creativity is a social construction constituted by the confluence of three different sources: (1) the cultural matrix of information (Domain); (2) individuals who bring some novel change in the domain (Person); and (3) a group of gatekeepers who either accept or reject the novelty (Field)”. 

Creativity’s components can be grouped in seven categories, with their respective components in each category:

• Underlying inborn attributes:
  • Talent;
• Underlying attained attributes
  • Domain competence (“broad distinguishable areas of competence that in the aggregate constitute a general descriptive framework for a profession”): “. . . creativity generally does require a certain level of expertise . . .” in the domain where creativity is shown (“However, considerable evidence supports the idea that creativity has both specific and general components, and that the level of specificity-generality changes with the social context and as one develops through childhood into adulthood.”);
  • Independence and freedom;
• Emotion: 
  • Emotional involvement, including enthusiasm;
• Cognitive (thinking):
  • Detail: highly creative people tend to absorb and process more environmental cues that average people – for example, if they spend a couple minutes in a room, they may recall 20 of the objects in the room, whereas an average person will recall 5 of them (an example of this is Leonardo da Vinci);
  • Divergent thinking (“the ability to generate creative ideas by combining diverse types of information”): “Divergent thinking (DT) is considered a key process of creativity. It is supported by different mental processes, ranging from executive functions to cognitive styles”;
  • Experimental design thinking;
  • Flexibility of thought;
  • General intellect: “Intelligence and creativity are known to be correlated constructs suggesting that they share a common cognitive basis”;
  • Imagination;
  • Generating multiple ideas;
  • Subconscious processing: in a study, “individuals who had unconsciously thought about ideas were better in selecting their most creative idea”;
  • Thinking and evaluation;
• Emotion and cognitive combined:
  • Intention;
  • Openness to experiences and to ideas;
  • Dealing with uncertainty;
  • Valuation;
• Active:
  • Active involvement;
  • Experimentation;
  • Problem solving;
  • Social interaction and communication;
  • Spontaneity;
• Global (emotion, thought and action combined):
  • Originality (however, various disciplines operationalize the connection in their own ways);
  • Persistence/tenacity;
  • Risk-taking, and a willingness to fail: creative people accept“productive failure”, i.e., failed efforts from which they learn and advance.

Many theories of creativity have been proposed, including:

• Four P framework (person, product, process and pres) (Person: understanding the traits, characteristics or attributes of the creative person; Process: describing the operations or stages of thinking used in the creative process; Press: examining the nature of situations and its context within the creative press (or environment) and the Product: identifying outcomes and qualities of creative products);
• Five A framework (actors, audiences, actions, artifacts and affordances) proposes that “creative action takes place not ‘inside’ individual creators but ‘in between’ actors and their environment”;
• Four C model of creativity “traces creative development from mini-c (personal creativity) to little-c (everyday creativity) to Pro-c (expert creativity) to Big-C (genius creativity)”;
• Amusement Park theoretical model “weaves together both domain-general and domain-specific factors supporting creative performance with a hierarchical structure. There are four levels of the model—Initial Requirements, General Thematic Areas, Domains, and Microdomains—that describe increasing levels of domain specificity”;
• Componential Model explores creativity in organizations, and has been updated;
• Investment Theory of Creativity “comprises 6 resources for creativity – intellectual processes, knowledge, intellectual style, personality, motivation, and environmental context”;
• Triangular Theory of Creativity: “. . . creative individuals defy the crowd (other people and their conscious beliefs), themselves (the individual), and/or the Zeitgeist (the shared and often unconscious worldview of their field)”;
• Multivariate approach: “Our study can be located in a multivariate approach to creativity, by taking into account as well cognitive as personality factors in relationship to creative potential”;
• Piirito’s Pyramid is “a model which takes into account genetics, personality, IQ, talent, and environmental influences that are essential in developing talent”;
• Evolving Systems Approach: “The creative person is unique, developmental change is multidirectional, and the creative person is an evolving system”;
• Reciprocal Model of the Creative Process: “creators’ general motivational orientations . . . are translated into specific motivational goals”;
• Matrix Model: “In this paper, we organize past and present theories and models of creativity by using a new conceptual framework—the creativity matrix—with the aim of highlighting the dimensions of creativity we know a lot about and those we tend to either ignore or find difficult to study. This matrix is formed by bringing together a developmental model of creativity (the 4 C’s) and a structural one (the 5 A’s).”;
• Structure of Intellect Model: “intelligence is viewed as comprising operations, contents, and products. There are 6 kinds of operations (cognition, memory recording, memory retention, divergent production, convergent production, evaluation), 6 kinds of products (units, classes, relations, systems, transformations, and implications), and 5 kinds of contents (visual, auditory, symbolic, semantic, behavioral).”;
• Triangular Theory: “. . . a triangular theory of giftedness that conceptualizes creativity largely as an attitude toward life rather than as ability based”, it is “a triangular theory of giftedness that conceptualizes creativity largely as an attitude toward life rather than as ability based”;
• Triarchic Theory: “. . . creative individuals defy the crowd (other people and their conscious beliefs), themselves (the individual), and/or the Zeitgeist (the shared and often unconscious worldview of their field).”;
• Modified Theory of Successful Intelligence “suggests an alternative notion of successful intelligence that expands on conventional notions of intelligence”;
• Geneplore (generate-explore) Model: “The suggestion is that creativity often involves a strategy of an initial generation phase, without strong goal control, which produces “preinventive” structures that are then interpreted during an exploratory phase to assess what could be done with the structure”;
• Blind Variation and Selective Retention (updated): “Simonton uses the term ‘blindness’ to mean (1) that variants are generated by chance, random or ‘pseudo-random’  processes typically occurring below the threshold of awareness, and (2) the creator has no subjective certainty about whether an idea is a step in the direction of the final creative product”;
• Associate Theory: “. . . an elaborate model that aimed to explain how creative ideas are generated and why creative people are more likely to have creative ideas”.

Factors shaping the creative mind have been identified as: “. . . (1) creative cognition and the associated neural systems in human and animal models; (2) creative drives such as mood states, emotion, motivation and regulatory focus and how their interactions could shape the creative performance; and (3) the impacts of three central neuromodulator systems, i.e., DA, NE, and 5-HT, on the interplay between creative cognition and creative drives.”

The domains of creativity may be seen as “artistic originality, scientific discovery, and comic inspiration”. Scientists can learn from and expand their scientific creativity by drawing on the arts.

“Creativity is part and parcel of human history and enables (groups of) individuals to adapt to and shape their natural and social surroundings.” “Having a creative mind is one of the gateways for achieving fabulous success and remarkable progress in professional, personal and social life.” It frees and engages the mind, appears to enhance a sense of meaning in life, and facilitates problem solving.

Creativity is also central to societal well-being. “The ability to creatively solve problems enabled early humans to survive and laid the foundation for the creative imagination that has resulted in our modern society.” “In a creative ecosystem, creative agency exists everywhere all the time in the form of potential provocations. It is a latent capacity to imagine, invent, improvise, and adapt beyond the seeming limitations of one’s present circumstances . . .”

People are drawn to creativity because it encourages them to be free. Yet many people stifle their creativity. For that reason, creativity is an ideal as well as a daily practice.