Creativity Is Not Talent

On moving through uncertainty as a practice.

We talk about creativity like it’s a gift, something certain people are “blessed” with, and others simply do not. We’ve even built entire categories around this belief: “creatives” who work in studios and agencies, who make visible things, who traffic in aesthetics and expression. The language reinforces the division. If you’re not producing art, writing books, or designing products, you’re not creative. You’re something else entirely — practical, logical, operational. But this is all a recent invention, and a really misleading one.

This myth has a history. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Shelley fundamentally changed how we think about creativity. Coleridge claimed his famous poem “Kubla Khan” came to him fully formed in an opium induced dream, stating that he was merely transcribing a vision, a passive vessel for forces beyond his control. Shelley wrote about waiting for inspiration to strike like lightning from the heavens, something you couldn’t summon, only receive if you were among “the chosen few”. These weren’t just colorful origin stories. They established a framework that still dominates to this day, causing us to see creativity as divine madness, as an external gift, as something that happens to certain special people rather than something anyone can learn to do.

They were not wrong about everything. They were definitely right about the feeling. When you’re deep in creative work, it often does feel like something moving through you, effortless and discovered rather than constructed. But they were catastrophically wrong about the mechanics. By treating creativity as mystical and innate, they made it seem inaccessible; you either had the gift or you didn’t. That lie has persisted for two centuries. I have friends who truly believe they are not “creative” and cannot do anything about it.

Here is the counter idea, the one that changes everything: creativity isn’t what you make. It’s how you move through uncertainty. We talk about creativity like it’s a gift. But history treats it like a practice.

Creativity Before Art

Creativity existed long before we invented categories like “art” and “design”. It wasn’t about self-expression or aesthetic output. It was about survival, adaptation, and intelligent response to the unknown.

Aristotle understood this. He wrote about teche as the skillful way of “making” that applied equally to crafting a pot, constructing an argument, or navigating a moral dilemma. He also described phronesis, practical wisdom, as the ability to perceive what a situation demands and respond appropriately. This wasn’t mechanical rule-following. It was creative judgment under uncertainty, and it couldn’t be reduced to formulas or templates. For Aristotle, there was no separation between “creative thinking” and “practical thinking”. Both required the same capacity: intelligent action in the face of the unknown.

Bergson took this further, arguing that life itself is a creative evolution: a constant adaptation, a perpetual beginning again. Creativity was not a special human capacity reserved for artists. Rather, it was the fundamental operation of existence, the ability to respond to what’s never been encountered before.

John Dewey made the observation explicit: the carpenter solving a problem of joining wood and the painter choosing a color are engaged in fundamentally similar creative acts. Both are perceiving, experimenting, adjusting, and discovering. The carpenter isn’t less creative because the output is functional rather than aesthetic. The operation is the same.

This reframes everything. Creativity isn’t performance or self-expression. It’s praxis: thoughtful action in response to the world as it actually presents itself, not as we wish it to be.

Play as Intelligence

John Cleese spent decades making people laugh, then spent decades teaching executives how to think. What he discovered created a bridge across both worlds: creativity isn’t a “mystical” state you fall into. It’s a mode you enter deliberately. Cleese described two modes of operating: the open mode and the closed mode.

The open mode is playful, exploratory, and spacious. Here, you’re allowed to be curious without needing immediate answers. You can tolerate uncertainty. You generate possibilities without judging them. You ask “what if?” without the fear of being wrong. This mode is where creativity happens.

The closed mode, on the other hand, is purposeful, decisive, and implementation-focused. You’ve made your choices, and now you execute on them. Here, you need clarity, efficiency, and closure. This mode is where productivity happens.

Both modes are important. But here’s the problem: we’ve structured our entire lives, particularly our working lives, to keep us constantly in closed mode. We’re always implementing, always deciding, always rushing towards resolution. We’ve effectively eliminated the conditions under which the open mode can emerge.

Cleese’s insight was that almost anyone can access the open mode. It’s not a rare gift. But it requires specific conditions, such as time without pressure, space without interruption, confidence to explore, and, crucially, the ability to sit with uncertainty without immediately collapsing it into certainty.

Play, properly understood, is how you create these conditions. Play isn’t childish. It isn’t careless or frivolous. It’s structured curiosity: a hypothesis without the ego, the freedom to experiment without the immediate demand for results. It’s the mind exploring without fear of being wrong, because “wrong” hasn’t been defined yet. You’re generating, not judging. This is intelligence at its most flexible, adaptive, and responsive. The open mode is where you notice what you aren’t looking for, making connections that aren’t obvious, and arrive at solutions that logic alone couldn’t produce. Play is how the mind explores without fear of being wrong.

Discipline as the Container for Creativity

Somewhere along the way, we learned to see discipline as creativity’s constraint. Structure as limitation, and routine as the death of spontaneity. The narrative became: creative people are wild, typically undisciplined, and spontaneous. They break rules, resist structure, and follow their whims. Discipline, we’re told, kills creativity. It constrains, limits, dulls the edge.

This is almost entirely backward. German philosopher Immanuel Kant understood that imagination needs form to become anything more than chaos. Aristotle knew that excellence emerges through habit, through the disciplined repetition of the right action until it becomes second nature. Neither of them saw discipline as creativity’s enemy. They saw it as creativity’s foundation. Discipline creates the container, and creativity fills it.

Without discipline, without the regular practice of entering the open mode, without protecting time and space, without the commitment to show up even when inspiration doesn’t, creativity becomes sporadic, unreliable, and fleeting. You’re constantly waiting for lightning to strike instead of building the conditions under which discovery becomes possible.

Discipline is what allows you to access creativity reliably. It creates the rhythm that makes sustained creative work possible instead of leaving you dependent on rare moments of inspiration. Structure doesn’t kill creativity; it keeps it alive.

Creative Fatigue: When Creativity Becomes Performance

There is a particular exhaustion spreading through contemporary life, and we’ve misnamed it. We call it burnout, depletion, or being “creatively drained”. But creative fatigue is something more specific and more insidious. It is what happens when creativity stops being an operation and becomes a performance.

The pressure is constant now, to produce, to publish, and to perform. The algorithms demand content. The attention economy requires visibility. You’re not just making, but you’re also marketing what you make, building an audience for it, and optimizing it for engagement. Creativity has been yoked to output in ways that fundamentally change its nature. This feels less like creation and more like extraction.

Nietzsche understood that creation requires tension, not depletion. The creative act emerges from the dynamic connection between these two opposing forces: structure and spontaneity, discipline and play, constraint and freedom. But when creativity becomes purely a performance, when it’s only about output and visibility, that tension collapses. You’re no longer creating, having something to express or explore, but you’re now having to create because the algorithm demands it.

Creative fatigue isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s the exhaustion that comes from a misalignment between meaning and output. You’re making things that don’t matter to you, on schedules that don’t respect your process, for reasons that have nothing to do with discovery or exploration. The signal isn’t “you’re not creative anymore.” The signal is “the conditions are wrong”.

Creative Block as a Threshold, Not a Wall

We treat creative block like a wall, something solid that stops us, a failure of capacity, evidence that we’ve run out of ideas or lost whatever spark we once had. But a block isn’t emptiness. It’s rarely about having nothing to say or make. It’s more often than not, standing at a threshold youre not yet ready to cross.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about natality as the human capacity to begin again, to initiate something new into the world. This wasn’t just about birth in the biological sense. It was about the fundamental human ability to start afresh, to break free of what came before, and to choose a different path. Natality is what makes us free.

Block often appears at exactly these moments described in Natality: when the old forms no longer fit. When you’ve outgrown your previous approach, continuing as you have been would mean denying something that’s emerged in you. The block isn’t stopping you from creating. It’s stopping you from creating in the way you used to. This is why it can feel so confusing. You have ideas, you have energy, but something won’t move. That’s because the movement isn’t forward in the same direction, but lateral into new territory. It’s a shift in identity, in voice, in what you’re willing to make, or say, or explore.

The culture reinforces the fear. Deviation feels dangerous. Changing your approach looks like inconsistency. Starting over seems like an admission of failure. Blocks are rarely about capacity. They’re about transition. An invitation disguised as resistance.

Creativity as a Way of Living

Creativity isn’t what you make. It’s how you move through uncertainty. This means that creativity applies far beyond art, design, writing, or any domain we traditionally label “creative”. It applies anywhere you encounter the unknown and must respond intelligently without predetermined solutions.

Leadership requires creativity. To perceive what a situation demands and respond in ways that can’t be scripted in advance. Decision-making under uncertainty is a creative act, weighing factors that don’t reduce to simple calculation. Relationships require constant creative navigation, adapting to another person’s changing reality, responding to conflict without fixed formulas, and building something together that neither person could construct alone. Parenting is creative. Problem-solving in any domain is creative. Conversations, when done well, are creative as you’re building meaning together in real time, discovering what you think by hearing yourself respond to what emerges.

Creativity, properly understood, is the capacity to begin again in the face of the unknown. It’s thinking without the safety of predetermined outcomes. It’s moving when the path is unclear. It’s responding to what’s actually in front of you rather than what you expected to find. This isn’t occasional. It’s not reserved for special projects or designated creative time. It’s a daily posture, a mode of operating, a fundamental mode of being in a world that constantly presents you with situations you’ve never encountered before.

The carpenter, the teacher, the programmer, the parent, the manager, all are engaged in creative work if they’re doing it well. All are perceiving, experimenting, adapting, and discovering. The operation is the same. Creativity is a way of living, not a category of production.