Creative people like to do things those non-creative people don’t do

Today I read this. It caught my attention among the hundreds of daily facebook posts I see because of course I regard myself as a creative person. I needed to know: do I do any of the 18 things listed here that creative people supposedly like to do?

Our out of all of them, I enjoy partaking the most in three of them: day dreaming, observing everything and people watching. I do all of these ALL THE TIME (sometimes at the same time).

Day dreaming was one of my biggest occupations at school as you can see from my school report below.

I obviously preferred day dreaming to geography

I obviously preferred day dreaming to geography

Day dreaming is, in my opinion, a very worthwhile occupation. It is while day dreaming that I come up with some of my best ideas (that is, ideas that don’t come to me during Monday night’s Zumba).

Observing everything (except those things that matter such as where I am going and whether that man is breaking into that car over there) is exhausting sometimes. It is the reason why I’m more comfortable around chaos than I am in solitude.

People watching is what lures me out of my ‘office’ (this chair I am sat in now) and into one of Shrewsbury’s many coffee shops to sit, draw, drink and pretend to be arty.

My office

My office

I can happily spend hours people watching and I have an ongoing collection of ‘the funny things people say’.

My constant companion

My constant companion

Not sure what the point of this all is though, it is just a weird compulsion to collect something that is usually instantly forgotten. It cheers me, however, to read in the ’18 things’ article that my friend Marcel Proust apparently spent a large chunk of his life (when he wasn’t lying in bed being a hypochondriac) people watching and writing down in his notebook about his observations.

I'm not an artist, but I do approve of thinking

I am watching you

There are other things mentioned in the article that I also relate to and hope that I do to some extent: loose track of time, connect the dots, take risks (although this terrifies me), and work the hours that suit best (I’m a morning person like Frank Lloyd Wright),

There are some things on the list I don’t do: shake things up. I run away from change. Seek new experiences. Not sure I do that very often – way too scary. Fail up. I don’t use the depths of despair to create art. Seek solitude. I’d rather be around chaos than in quiet.

But as one friend commented to me today: surely everyone is creative? I agree; everyone has creativity in them. So does this mean that the article is talking about everyone? Possibly. Or is this an example of me ‘asking the big questions’ and analyzing everything beyond an inch of its life. Probably. That’s because I am creative.

References

Gregoire, C. ’18 Things Creative People Do Differently’, 3 March 2014, Huffington Post. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/04/creativity-habits_n_4859769.html [last accessed 8 March 2014]

 

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