“My mother took me to see all the great acts of that time. Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Billy Eckstine—all these old singers and bandleaders and all those people who were so wonderful. And so these people were the ones who I thought of as being highly creative. It was so obvious that they were making this art out of their own bodies. We all lived in the same neighborhood. You just ran into them—here they are, you know? I was deeply inspired by their art and by their willingness to give of themselves to the public and to their audience. It made me understand about the communication aspect of being an artist.
“I was never forced to be like the other kids. I did not dress like them. I did not look like them. And in my family, it was not expected that I should be like that. So, it came quite natural to me to do something that was considered a bit odd. My mother was a fashion designer. She was an artist herself, although she would never have said she was an artist. She helped me a lot, but she was very keen on the fact that she did not know whether art would be a good lifetime endeavor.”
When Faith at last began going to school full‐time, she found encouragement and excitement in her art classes.
“We had art in elementary school right straight through. An excellent experience. Excellent. I distinctly recall my teachers getting excited about some of the things that I had done and me kind of wondering, Why do they think this is so good?—but I never said anything. In junior high school, the teacher did a project with us in which she wanted us to try to see it without looking. We were supposed to paint these flowers in that way. I said, ‘Oh my god, I do not want her to see this, because this is really awful.’ And she held it up and said, ‘Now, this is really wonderful. Look at this.’
“Now I know why she liked it. It was free and it was the same kind of thing that I like when I see children do art. It is expressive; it is wonderful. This is the kind of magic that children have. Children do not see anything so strange and different about art. They accept it; they understand it; they love it. They walk into a museum and they are looking all around, they do not feel threatened. Whereas adults do. They think there are some messages there they do not get, that they are supposed to have something to say or do in relation to these works of art. The children can just accept it because somehow or other they are born that way. And they stay that way until they begin to start picking themselves apart. Now, maybe it is because we start picking them apart. I try not to do that, but the world is going to pick them apart and, you know, judge them this way and that—this does not look like a tree, or this does not look like a man. When children are little, they are not paying attention to that. They are just—they are just unfolding right before your eyes. ‘This is my mommy and this is my daddy and we went to the house and cut down the tree and this and that and the other,’ and they tell you a whole story about it, and they accept it and they think it is wonderful. And I do too. Because they are completely unrepressed where these things are concerned.
“I think children have that same natural ability in music. Their little voices are like little bells that they are ringing. I went to a school where I did a forty‐minute session with each of the grades, starting with the prekindergarten, going all the way up to the sixth grade. I did this art session with them in which they would read from a book and then I would teach them. I would show them some of my slides and then I would teach them how to sing my song ‘Anyone Can Fly.’ They just picked that up, whether they were little prekindergarten, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade. By the fifth grade, you are running into trouble. Their little voices are no longer like bells; they are feeling ashamed of themselves, you know, and some of them who can still sing will not.”
Fortunately, Faith never felt stifled in this way. She loved exploring her creativity from an early age, and she managed to keep that spark alive into adulthood.
“I think the minute that I started studying art in college in 1948 I knew I wanted to be an artist. I did not know which road I would take, how it would happen, or how I could be that, but I knew that was my goal. My dream was to be an artist, one who makes pictures for a lifetime, as a way of life. Every day of your life you can create something wonderful, so every day is going to be the same kind of wonderful day that every other day is—a day in which you discover something new because as you are painting or creating whatever it is you are creating, you are finding new ways in doing it.”
The Promise of Creativity
I mentioned that I like to ask audiences how intelligent they feel they are. I usually ask these same people how they rate their creativity. As with intelligence, I use a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 at the top. And, as with intelligence, most people rate themselves somewhere in the middle. Out of perhaps a thousand people, fewer than twenty give themselves 10 for creativity. A few more will put their hands up for 9 and 8. On the other end, a handful always puts themselves at 2 or 1. I think that people are mostly wrong in these assessments, just as they are about their intelligence.
But the real point of this exercise reveals itself when I ask how many people gave themselves different marks for intelligence and for creativity. Typically, between two‐thirds and three‐quarters of the audience raise their hands at this point. Why is this? I think it is because most people believe that intelligence and creativity are entirely different things—that we can be very intelligent and not very creative or very creative and not very intelligent.
For me, this identifies a fundamental problem. A lot of my work with organizations is about showing that intelligence and creativity are blood relatives. I firmly believe that you can’t be creative without acting intelligently. Similarly, the highest form of intelligence is thinking creatively. In seeking the Element, it is essential to understand the real nature of creativity and to have a clear understanding of how it relates to intelligence.
In my experience, most people have a narrow view of intelligence, tending to think of it mainly in terms of academic ability. This is why so many people who are smart in other ways end up thinking that they’re not smart at all. There are myths surrounding creativity as well.
One myth is that only special people are creative. This is not true. Everyone is born with tremendous capacities for creativity. The trick is to develop these capacities. Creativity is very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. If a person can’t read or write, you don’t assume that this person is incapable of it, just that he or she hasn’t learned how to do it. The same is true of creativity. When people say they’re not creative, it’s often because they don’t know what’s involved or how creativity works in practice.
Another myth is that creativity is about special activities. It’s about “creative domains” like the arts, design, or advertising. These often do involve a high level of creativity. But so can science, math, engineering, running a business, being an athlete, or getting in or out of a relationship. The fact is you can be creative at anything at all—anything that involves your intelligence.