This article originally appeared in Psychology Today.
Who doesn’t want to be more creative? Even though it’s free, an individual’s creativity today is what I believe to be our most valuable form of cultural currency. It can’t be argued that creativity occupies a special place throughout the world. Unlike externally defined symbols of success such as wealth, power, and fame, creativity is a personally defined trait that expresses one’s authentic identity and tells people who you are.
Rather than be limited to a certain number of gifted people, however, creativity is a basic human quality that can be further developed if one knows how. Best of all, perhaps, creativity crosses the boundaries of humanity with reckless abandon, illustrating that the process incorporates a confluence of mind, body, and spirit. Creativity also has a total disregard for our socially constructed buckets of race, class, gender, age, ability, and sexual orientation, revealing that we have way more in common than we tend to think.