Adults Habituate, Killing Creativity
By: William Whatley
Tags: Failure, Self Improvement, Design, Creativity, Development

We actively work against ourselves to limit our own creativity; society’s constructs are designed to habituate — the most detrimental poison to one’s creativity.

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

For the past 4 years, I’ve mentored high school students in programming and entrepreneurship and I’ve found it to one of the most rewarding things one can do. Kids never cease to amaze me — the questions they ask, the way they see the world, and the solutions they find to everyday problems.

Often my mentor peers say “wow kids are just getting smarter and smarter,” which I can’t see why that could be true. Especially over the span of 3 generations, it’s hardly likely that humans have evolved in any intellectually significant way. Of course, we have been uprooted and changed by technology, but even so, people have been saying the same since forever.

What I have found is that kids are generally far more creative than adults. At least, their creativity “chi” is left unblocked. They see the world like a blank canvas, to be shaped and interpreted however they please by a spectrum of colors.

Adults, on the other hand, create habits. Driving or walking to work, grocery shopping, hanging out with friends, and pretty much any other task that can be thought of becomes automated — we put it on auto-pilot and it becomes a habit.

When we turn a task into a habit, we aren’t open to any sort of change — we’ve found the “optimal” way to do something and that’s the end of that story. I think of it like when you have a word on the tip of your tongue, but can’t remember it and instead, you default to some other random word and can’t get past it to find the word you’re searching for. This is what happens when we try and think about our habits in a different way.

“To stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play.”

Prefrontal Cortex

To make matters worse, at around 25 years of age, our prefrontal cortex matures and becomes more “rational.” This part of our brain is responsible for cognitive behavior, decision making, personality expression, and executive brain functions. As it matures, we are able to make better judgements and decisions, relate short-term rewards with long-term goals, foresee and weigh possible consequences of behavior, and form strategies and plan.

As a side-effect of the development of our prefrontal cortex, we also overlook a wonderfully weird world, full of problems to be identified and solutions to be discovered. We have forever been separated from the whimsical, unique, and beautiful creativity that kids forever captivate us with.

How we perceive failure

In addition to our cognitive developments, we as adults become less tolerant of making errors. Arguably the most important part of creating is making errors. It doesn’t mean that we’ve failed, but that’s how we view it. This makes adults less apt to try things that might fail. I wrote an article more about failure, check it out here.

We also feel as though we have less room to make errors — it’s easy to fall into routine and not see the benefit in trying things that could fail, but the world is waiting for you. We need new solutions and always will and our social construct built on “failure is wrong,” is in-fact wrong.

Tips to be unlock your childhood creativity

Guess what? Even though our prefrontal cortex dictates a more rational lifestyle, that doesn’t mean that we’ve lost our creativity forever — it just means we have to unlock it.

Try new things

Make mistakes

Be weird

Take breaks

Interact with kids more

Thanks for reading!

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