English

Creativity

What’s creativity? Where does it come from? How can you nurture your own? These are the top questions you should ask yourself when you hear this word.

Let’s begin with its definition.

According to the Oxford’s dictionary, “creativity” is the use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness. With this being said, I can’t understand the reason why people have this crazy idea that you’re either super creative or totally worthless. And it all comes from a single source: our society.

Society enjoys promoting this idea and has also conceived another one that implies that creativity is something you’re born with and that you can’t improve it during your life. Well, I think that all of this is nothing but untrue and idiotic. To me, creativity is a personal characteristic, but everyone has it on a certain level; some have it more developed, while others are still working towards it.

Nevertheless, we all have it in ourselves in different shapes and forms: it doesn’t just come with music, painting, dancing, writing or other types of art. Any person who finds a solution to a problem is naturally creative, no matter if you’ve invested a lot of thinking in it or not.

For example: I’m working to be a medical investigator in the future and one of the things I long the most in this area is finding a cure for certain diseases or improve the lives of the ill ones. To be able to do so, I absolutely need to be creative because it’s not just about knowledge or research. Of course those things are important, but in the investigation the whole point is to have new and wider ideas, even if they’re combined with previous ones.

Most of the time, our creativity plays us some tricks. We often seek for a certain “final product” but in the end it’s completely different from the original idea. This can be either good or bad, but it’s usually good.

Sara Vieira GonçalvesNº2711th B

English

Being creative has its issues as well. It’s not always easy as sometimes you may feel hopeless or unsure of the idea so you feel like quitting. You have to think that there are obstacles in most of the things you do in your life, but you must be stronger than those obstacles and get through them because nothing should stop you. You will see that when you least expect it, a mere glimpse of creativity will appear and you will be able to make your idea come true.

I’ve searched for some ways of nurturing our creativity, such as:

Be calm, slow down, and think clearly. We’re always in such a big hurry and always stressing about everything. Most of the times, that makes us unable to have a clear mind, therefore the reason why sometimes we feel uninspired to create something. We should be always working on something, whatever it is, so we can develop our mind to come up with new solutions, new ideas.

Develop your favorite skill. If you love it, it’s worth doing it. Enough said. Be adventurous, fearless and proactive. Don’t be afraid to be wrong:

sometimes those mistakes lead us to the best work we’ve ever done. Do things that inspire you, such as travelling, reading or even studying!

Pay attention. Analyze the details in each thing and look at everything very carefully. The most amazing things are often in the little details.

Be yourself.

Sara Vieira GonçalvesNº2711th B