Thursday, March 15, 2007

Creativity or consistency?

What is more important, being creative or being consistent?

Creativity is not a skill. It is something that you cannot acquire. You cannot imbibe in you the qualities of a creative person. You cannot learn to be creative. It is something that either you can have or you cannot have.

On the contrary you can learn to be consistent. You can practice to be consistent. Consistency is something that you definitely can have after practice and hard work.

Creativity has no relation with any kind of hard work. If you are creative, you can be creative without any effort. But, if you want to be consistent you have to put in hard efforts.

So again, what is more important, being creative or being consistent?

We hear of the stories of great actors and how their glory just faded off in just a film or two. We read critics ascertaining the fact that xyz could have been a good actor or a painter or a director or a writer or a poet… had he tried to maintain consistency. What does this mean? On one side you avow that the person is potentially talented. You also agree on the fact that the person has done his job extra-ordinarily well. And then you suddenly start debating on his proficiency in the field, on account of his not being consistent.

Can you be consistently creative?

2 comments:

Vivekanand said...

Hi,

I think being creative and consistent both is asking for a rare combination.

Take aamir khan , in every role, every work he has innvovated and he is being doing this for quite some time now !

Its difficult to keep bringing in cerativity in our work on a dialy basis.

See Himesh . He brought some new things in beginning but then his success killed him. Then you could just make out an himesh song !

I guess our creativity is limited by our intellect and our mental toughness.

I can write very good logic but 4 years of coding has made me "get the work done " kind of programmer and the creativity has been lost.

Regards ,

Vivek

madbani said...

Creativity... Your statement that creativity is not a skill made me think over it. Yes it's not a skill but is it something that people can't acquire... But people can lose it may not be forever but it can become dormant. I think creativity is a quality which everyone has, may be hidden deep inside most and in full bloom in few. Yes, it is that way, my life says that to me. I still remember how I used to play cricket with pencil and eraser when I was told not to go out to play with friends because of bad marks in exams when I was in class 3. I still remember how I used to solve numericals and give myself 4 runs for right answer and a wicket out for a wrong answer when I was preparing for IIT. Creativity comes in lots of forms, like I told my parents that I am going to attend the Tech fest of IIT Kanpur to give a paper presentation but instead I had gone to play the Counter Strike Tournament. Creativity also came in when I told my parents that a NRI sold his one month old bicycle for 2K when I bought a new one for 10K. Creativity came in when I went for Kalsubai trek and told my parents I am going Shirdi and there may not be any mobile network there.

Creativity... My project mates admire my cycling travelogues and say I can write well but some don't know that there's creativity in solving a defect in a piece of code too.

Creativity... Grown ups forget that they are creative. Creative are labeled as crazy in this new age ;)
The New Age or the switch-it-on age where you get a switch for everything you do... the age were you get a electronic bicycle, a bicycle without pedals will be the next invention of this age. And that's what the new creativity is.