The boxes we make

I’m not a creative, I heard myself say.

Yes, I make things, build stories and create ideas, but no I’m not creative, because I don’t have a neck beard, and you won’t find me riffing on the merits of single origin coffee coffee beans.

It seems that I had made a box for creatives and clearly I didn’t fit in it.

When I heard one of my daughters say “I”m not a maths person”, I realised that she’d done the same.

Although she is scoring in the 80s for every assessment in the specialist maths class, she’d decided that a “maths person” looked and behaved differently from her. She’d made a box for maths people and that didn’t include her.

Stereotypes make the world much easier to deal with. They allow us to speed up our decision making. I’d expect a caveman looking out of his cave seeing a sabretooth tiger heading his way, would have needed to make a quick decision based on either his prior experience with them, or shared knowledge. His ability to make a quick decision would have been the difference between life and death.

In today’s world, however, quick decisions based on stereotypes can be a liability. The labelling of someone as a “creative”, an “analytic”, a “zealot” or in sales lingo as a “hunter” or “farmer” fails to recognise that all these things exist on a spectrum.

Recognising the diversity of abilities within each person you come into contact is critical to getting the most out of life. But recognising that we are often much more than we see ourselves as is the key to realising more of our own potential. I am a creative, in addition to being a analytic, a thinker, a maker and a doer and many other things.