A distinctive feature of creativity is that it usually involves associations rather than deductions. In other words, creativity often involves ideas and images “coming to mind” through indirect pathways, rather than directly from ordinary reasoning.
What I like about this way of describing creativity is that it could in principle be fitted into current scientific studies on cognitive thinking and decision-making. Yet, it is also a bit too simplistic. For example, while creative people tend to be very good at finding non-obvious associations (e.g., “wall” to “freedom”), we would not call someone creative if they were limited to free association sequences all the time. It is only the meaningful connections that are the sign of creativity. All of which suggests that being creative is not just a purely descriptive concept, but partly a normative one – it has a to-do with our assessment of what kind of non-obvious connections between ideas are meaningful or valuable. Consider, perhaps, things like surrealism or absurdist comedy (Shoutout to South Park creators). In a different artistic climate, they might have been dismissed as ridiculous and unhinged rather than creative.
One other challenging aspect of creativity as a notion is that it appears to be related to our assumptions about unconscious thinking. Picture two people working on the same problem. The first one lies down and turns the problem over in his head, only to awake the next morning with the answer unexpectedly there. The other person spends the whole night methodically processing the same problem and comes up with the exact same answer. We might intuitively call the first person more creative simply because they arrived at their answer unconsciously, despite the fact that both people used broadly the same cognitive processes. Therefore, I believe that this may be another characteristic of creativity -the less explicit the conscious reasoning in solving a problem, the less creatively it was approached.
It is important that you have both confidence and knowledge/experience to be innovative. It requires confidence because one should not be afraid to fail. To create something new, you have to take the risk of doing things that have never been done before, possibly resulting in failure or poor performance.
So is creativity a skill or a talent?
I’ve always thought of it as a muscle – the more you use it, the more powerful and defined it becomes. To address the point directly, it’s both. You can have an innate talent, but talent alone is not enough. It has to be developed and refined through practice, which makes it a skill as well. Thus, sometimes it is important to abandon the process and trust your instincts, and vice versa, and other times it is necessary to plan and iterate through your mind.