The second secret to academic success also has two parts. The first part of this secret is that learning is a creative act. Successful students are people who consistently draw on their creative abilities to help them make sense of the material they are learning. As new information reaches their brains, these students subconsciously make connections between the new information and information they have already encountered. If their brains cannot create the links on their own, creative individuals know to ask others to help them make those links.
The second part of this secret is that every single person on the planet has the capacity to be creative. Just as we are born with the impulse to actively pursue learning, so too are we born with the capacity to create. Creativity is our birthright! Our creativity is involved in how we make sense of the world and is intimately connected with our ability to learn. Our creativity allows us to take in new information, process it, and make sense of it in ways that may be entirely new and unique. But if our creativity is blocked, then learning becomes a challenge.
In our society people often link creativity with the arts. They have difficulty understanding the importance of creativity to anything that is not related to painting, writing, or music. But where would people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Matt Mullenweg be today if they were not creative?
As we saw with active learning, blocks to our creativity are created by life experiences. Every life experience, and especially those we have early in our lives, is an opportunity for a block to be created.
Do you remember playing with crayons, markers, or paints when you were a child? Perhaps you can remember playing in a sandbox, the dirt, or on the beach. Most people who recall these early days of their lives remember being very uninhibited in their explorations. Young children are enormously skilled at finding creative ways of engaging and manipulating their environments. Even children who lack access to modern toys and crafting supplies will be creative with whatever tools are available: rocks, sticks, dirt, snow, even items that other people might normally discard, all are potential tools for creativity in the hands of a child.
When the child’s creations are received in a positive or even a neutral environment, the child’s creativity will remain uninhibited and will grow and develop with that child, assisting and supporting her in creating a satisfying and rewarding life. But many children’s creations are judged or condemned, perhaps most damagingly by well-meaning parents, teachers, or caregivers. When these judgments or condemnations are repeated or severe, the child may learn to suppress the innate desire to create.
Popular children’s literature is ripe with examples of evil caretakers who punish children’s creativity. Consider what happens to Hansel and Gretel when they creatively use small white pebbles to find their way home after being abandoned in the woods—they are simply abandoned again, but without any warning that would give them the opportunity to prepare a means of finding their way home.
In fairy tales, children who are so abused typically prevail. In real life however, events that suppress the creative impulse may be neither as blatantly abusive nor as easy to identify.
Can you remember a time in your life when you were reprimanded, humiliated, or even dismissed for something that you had created? If you cannot recall a specific incident in your own life, consider this example. Imagine a preverbal child who decides to use crayons or markers on the living room wall. The curious child is simply exploring her environment and using her creative abilities to make sense of the objects she finds there. Now imagine the response of the parent who discovers the child in the midst of her act of creating. If the parent’s response feels threatening to the child, the child may learn to associate the act of being creative with the negative feelings brought on by the parent’s threatening response. The child then reasons that the easiest way to avoid experiencing these negative feelings, which are stored in the body’s subconscious memory, is to avoid engaging creativity.
As we saw with resistance to learning, the aversion to using one’s creativity is really just a conditioned response to an environmental stimulus. The child has simply learned to associate being creative with unpleasant feelings. Avoiding those unpleasant feelings can be accomplished by avoiding anything that involves creativity.
Since academic success requires creativity, we can now understand how one might subconsciously choose to avoid being successful there.
The sad news here is that creativity is a prerequisite for success in just about anything you might want to do in life. The good news is that you can change your conditioned response to accessing your creativity.
The tests in Chapter Two of this book will help you to determine if your creativity is blocked and to uncover potential sources of those blocks. And then in Chapter Three I explain exactly how you can clear any blocks you have identified.