Hello. Welcome back. In this first session of week one of Cracking the Creativity Code, we'll define creativity. And I'll talk a bit about why creativity declines so disastrously when children grow from age five to age fifteen. And why creativity isn't just about creating gadgets. Our definition of creativity I think is crucial. We define, first of all, how do you define creativity? Novel ideas, new things. We define creativity as widening the range of choice. The reason this definition is important is that many of us are creatures of habit, and we try to narrow the range of choice rather than widen it. We pick things that we like and then we stick with that, and we avoid new things because new things are sometimes uncomfortable. So, the very first step in becoming more creative is to break the chains of habit and to explore new things, new foods, new clothing, new music, new friends, new experiences. Warren Buffett once said that the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they become too heavy to be broken. Break the chains of habit. Explore your uncomfortable zones. Widening the range of choices. You can do the same thing which is very comfortable and very safe and very secure or you can try new things. And those new things, if you don't like them, if they're not good, don't do them, drop them. But if they are good, they can enrich your life, and make you life much more interesting and lively. Here's a small experiment. I'd like all my students, fold your arms. Fold your arms as I've done. Now, normally you fold your arms in one way. I fold my arms with the left arm over the right. Now, reverse your arms. Fold your right arm over your left if that's the opposite way to what you usually do. How does that feel? For me, it feels very uncomfortable because I'm not used to it. This is what I'm used to. So, we're comfortable with things we're used to. We're uncomfortable with things that are new, that we're not used to. Practice being uncomfortable. So that when you develop new ideas, you overcome that discomfort barrier. Break your habits. Break the chains of habits. I once told this to my students that I wanted them to do new things, new foods, new music, new friends, new clothes, different clothes during the week that I was teaching them. And they took their revenge by asking me to do the same and that meant that I had to listen to rap music, which I rather dislike. But, it was interesting. Perhaps enriched my life a little bit. So, creativity is this weird combination of head in the clouds and feet on the ground. Head in the cloud imagination, and then feet on the ground practicality to make those ideas happen. And that's why real creativity is so hard. Creativity is actually doing something, making something. Making something happen isn't just the ideas. Da Vinci had great ideas. He wrote them in a notebook. And most of them were never implemented. He invented the tank, the submarine, the airplane, the helicopter, the parachute. Somebody built a da Vinci parachute based on his drawings, but it took 500 years. We don't want to wait 500 years for people to implement our ideas. Head in the clouds and feet on the ground. Someone I greatly respect as a British educator named Sir Kenneth Robinson. And he was knighted for his efforts to make schools teach kids more creatively. He believes that schools kill creativity. And he knows what he's talking about, it almost happened to him. I urge you to view his 18-minute talk on TED. The URL is shown on your screen. And I would just briefly like to read some of his quotations about schools. You can also look up his book. One of his books is called Out of Our Minds, Learning to Be Creative. Really, really wonderful book. Robinson basically says that our schools give us a very strange paradoxical message, so do our big companies. I expect all of you to be independent, innovative, critical thinkers, who will do exactly as I say. And that just doesn't work. Do we really teach children in ways that foster creativity? We really don't. Henry Ford once said, when I hire a pair of hands, why do they come attached to a brain? You don't need a brain on his assembly line, where each worker has to do one simple task and do it again and again precisely and accurately with high quality for an entire day. This is the industrial system. And what Robinson says I'll quote here from his book called The Element, How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. He says that public schools were not only created in the interest of industrialism, they were created in many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support. And this is especially true of high schools where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labor. Schools divide the curriculum into segments. Some teachers install math and others install history, and they arrange the day into standard units. And we kind of learn old knowledge rather than be stimulated to find or earn new knowledge. Now, you need the old stuff, you need to know that, you need mastery as Confucius called it. But you also need rebellion and creativity, and that part schools tend to mess up. And here's the evidence on your screen. This is from a study done by Land and Jarman in their 1992 book, and it shows creativity measured by the Torrance creativity test. This is a test that we're going to ask you to take, a shortened version. And it's given to kids who are five, a version of the test, when they're ten, and then when they're fifteen, and later when they're adults. Of course five year olds are geniuses in terms of creativity. All five year olds are creative and the reason is simple. They haven't yet learned what is impossible, so anything is possible. And for a creative person, when anything is possible, everything is possible. And then we send them to school and they learn the right way to do things, and the creativity score drops from 98% genius to 32% genius and 10% genius when they're 15. And by the time they're adults the genius percentage is down to 2%. We've beaten out that creative spark. We've extinguished it in people partly with our school systems. Can you teach children to think creatively? Or are they just born with it? Well, according to a big expert, Paul Torrance, who invented one of the main tests of creativity, he says I know it can be done. He has done it himself. His wife has done it. And he's seen excellent teachers do it. We've all seen children who are non-thinkers learn to think creatively for years afterward simply by practice by stimulation and by inspired teachers teach them how to do it. And there are many, many studies who show how to do this. How to use practice exercises to stimulate creativity. A book that I'm especially fond of is a book by a doctor, Norman Doidge called The Brain That Changes Itself. And we now know that some of these exercises, including creativity exercises, actually change physiologically our brain, in ways that are highly desirable. So, to make this point, and emphasize it, creativity is widening the range of choice. Not just in terms of gadgets, the things that we buy and use everyday, but in every aspect of the human existence. Everything we do from morning till night, everything people do; organizations and governments and societies, and cities. Creativity is about widening the range of choice in everything. We face a world of growing resource scarcity, of shrinking government budgets, of growing human needs, of growing poverty, growing inequality. And we can either wring our hands about it. Or, we can say, how can I use my brain, this great gift that's been given to me, the gift of imagination? How can I use it to come up with ideas that maybe use fewer resources to create more fruitful, more enriched, more happy, more full lives for people everywhere through time? And this ends session one and we'll go on to session two in a moment.
