Recently, while on holiday in a small village outside of Mumbai, I had the opportunity to discuss creativity with our host, Gaurav, a talented musician, photographer, and cook, along with my father-in-law, Prasad, a PhD in environmental engineering, professor, and skilled writer as well.
It was a fantastic conversation about a topic often discussed without proper context or understanding, especially with the rise of AI, which co-opts ideas from around the world to enable creatives to be less involved in the tedious conception and execution of original ideas. This isn’t to suggest that AI shouldn’t play a role, but I feel we risk losing certain rewards that come from the creative process in favor of efficiency and volume.
True creativity is not a numbers game—it’s a qualitative one. More and more, what we see created is driven by scale and speed but lacks authenticity and originality; it focuses on marketing that is necessary for the pace of today’s business world. That is not what I aim to discuss here.
How Does Creativity Work, and What Makes People Creative?
This discussion has been had for ages, and I have always found it fascinating. Creativity is not confined to the painter’s canvas, the writer’s journal, or a chef’s stove. It can be seen in successful entrepreneurs’ ability to assess problems and devise solutions. You can see it in engineers as they build better frameworks for operations. You can also see it in teachers and the way they engage with a class of reluctant students and capture their attention.
Creativity is the willingness—or better yet, the desire—to do more than what has been done before in a given context. It is the courage to take risks by evaluating past results and improving upon them. Creativity involves embracing failure to persist through it and end with something better.
So, Where Does it Start?
There has to be a foundation for creativity to jump off of—very few people are born with an innate ability to simply conceive something revolutionary. These folks exist, and it is exciting to meet them and see their brains work through problems. That is not me; my creativity developed over years of application and failure. It was nurtured in the kitchens of my youth, where playing with fire and sharp objects was thrilling and opened my mind to taking a less conventional route than my parents probably would have preferred. I was a good student and tested well; I never truly felt challenged in school until college.
This left time and space for my mind to seek out other ways to exercise—new food combinations, new ways to execute my station as a 16-year-old line cook, and yes, new drugs and alcohol to satisfy that craving. I was a teenage alcoholic and tried everything I discovered while still managing to graduate near the top of my class and earn scholarships to college. I got real creative every time I had to stand before a judge.
Experience, education, effort, success, failure, curiosity, introspection, courage, and humility—all contribute to the foundation of creativity. It is not the pursuit of an abstract or grandiose ability to be original. Rather, it is the quest for authenticity, grounded in an open-ended willingness to make progress. It is the utility of one’s daily life experiences as a critical lens through which to view the next problem encountered.
Creativity emerges when your talent, skills, experience, aptitude, and knowledge confront limitations. Those limitations may be the edges of a canvas, the challenge of harnessing water for hydroelectric energy generation, or the time and resources available to feed 300 people; it matters not. Place a true creative in a box, and they will find a way out—that is the essence of creativity for me.
What’s The Point?
I say all of this to take creativity off its pedestal and integrate it into our daily lives. The quality of your creativity depends on your humility when approaching a new task; it improves when you willingly engage in something you’re not skilled at or when you intentionally fail. Stop being so precious about it, and it will improve. Acknowledge the ways you’re already creative and appreciate them. Seek out information that makes you uncomfortable; comfort is the enemy of creativity. Choose challenging work; push your physical limits. It should make you smile spontaneously but also cry unexpectedly.
It is messy and impossible to control; we can only hope to refine its direction and harness its power. It serves as the foundation of a fulfilling life for many people from various walks of life. It is not just for artists and chefs, but it will never be realized by the cruel or hateful. It requires honest effort but rewards an energy that propels life forward.
In my early twenties, I was given the opportunity to run a fine dining restaurant in my hometown, Savannah, Georgia. Maintaining a kitchen pushes the bounds of creativity in many facets. Creating new dishes is the most obvious, but how does an inexperienced chef train themselves to create?
Reading cookbooks is a start, but understanding flavor combinations is more than cooking Julia’s recipes. There are also excellent books about creating a dish—Culinary Artistry by Dornenburg and Page (1996) was pivotal for me. But still, that is just theoretical; creativity has to have substance.
One thing I did was what I called “Foods That I Hate Day.” Once a month, I would sit down and eat foods that I didn’t particularly enjoy. It exposed me to flavors I hadn’t been raised with and enabled me to understand my palate to a new degree. Capers, olives, or blue cheese with seemingly off notes and pungent flavors I wasn’t comfortable with became ingredients I could easily deploy to add the right salty or funky note to a dish. The counterpoint of briny capers to garden-fresh herbs and acidic lemon zest, finished with a nice olive oil, was revelatory in how simple things could be so exciting to eat.
Intentionally re-engaging with flavors that I found challenging had unintended consequences. With a deeper understanding of how my palate worked, I found more confidence in approaching the cutting board. A perspective on building flavors added dimension to my ability to create something from the plate up.
Creativity Isn’t Magic—It’s a Daily Practice
Remember that ideas are cheap. When your education and experience evolve into expertise, your ideas have the potential to create art. Through dedication and discipline, you build the foundation that allows the mundane to transform into the artistic. Creativity is a way of viewing life on a daily basis that, through hard work, enables you to reimagine it, one opportunity at a time.