Creativity is a team sport

It’s so romantic to think of creativity as an act of individualism. The idea of a lone genius, locked up in a flat, clacking away on a mechanical keyboard while the rain lashes at their windows. Or a painter, pouring their tortured soul onto a canvas, with rats nibbling at his toes.

It’s what movies and myths and legend is made of.

But that is a really limited view on creating. There is something we don’t say enough.

Creativity is an act of communion and sharing.

It is two minds coming together, dragging all of their life experience, memories, feelings and unique ways of looking at the world into a safe space in which an exchange can happen. Where their hearts can open and where everything and anything can be said.

Where fragments of memories, insights and observations are swirled into a vortex of free flowing conversation, picking up speed and momentum as the flow skips from topic to topic until some fragments snap together in new and unusual combinations.

This is how ideas are formed. How new things are made. How the co-existence of oppositive points of view is not just tolerated, but encouraged, how yin and yang come together to make a new whole. How the role of inspirator and creator is thrown backwards and forwards between individual…