Lesson: Creatively Entrepreneurial with Carl Nordgren

Step #1 Creative: Understanding our creative nature

Everyone is by nature creative. All you have to do is spend some time around 3 and 4-year-olds then you become absolutely convinced that we are all by nature creative, but there are also research that supports it.

There is a really very interesting study that took place a few years back, when NASA, our aerospace administration decided they were back in the '60s that they want to put a man on the moon, they came to understand how important it would be for them to hire creative scientists and engineers to make that happen. So, they developed an assessment tool that could measure a really important part of our creative abilities which is our divergent thinking, our ability to find lot's of solutions and multiple categories of solutions for a problem that we are trying to solve.

So NASA believed again that their scientists and their engineers needed to be very good at divergent thinking. They created an assessment tool, so that we can measure those qualities in you during the recruitment process.

Some researchers found out about this assessment tool, they adapted it for an audience of 4-year-olds, they administered it to 1500 4-year-olds and using NASA's grading scale determined that 98% of these 1500 4-year-olds were creative geniuses. Now they continued to measure this group as they became 12-year-olds and 17-year-olds and 21-year-olds and I forget the exact statistic but somewhere when they last measured them when they were about 23 years old only about 4 or 5% of them showed up as creative geniuses. But the point is, it shows us that we are born that way.

Unfortunately, so many of our institutions especially education have an influence and impact on us that caused us to sort of retreat from our creative selves. It is wonderful to behold how just with a little bit of permission and a little bit of confidence on their part, these natural creative qualities began to come to the surface again and begin to take a life of their own. And with a little bit of intentional effort on behalf of the students they can grow and grow over the course of a semester often and in a transformative fashion.

Creative populism is an idea that each of us and all of us should be consciously, should be intentionally growing our creative capacity developing our entrepreneurial instincts to intentionally become the most generative version of ourselves that we can be. I found the creative populism is a fun label people appreciate the universality of both that concept and the idea that inform that concept by using that language.