I lied. I said I wouldn’t use the word “Creative” in my posts for a while, but it keeps coming back. I guess I am obsessed with it, in a good way. Obsession is good as long as it does not hurt anyone (including myself) and it applied to general social good to the society at large.

Just yesterday, I was talking to a friend in NY, who happens to be a psychiatrist by profession. We were discussing OCD as a disease and she made a comment that struck me “All people who want to improve what they do (like Doctors for eg.) are obsessed with wanting to improve”.

I could empathize.

I have not been feeling well for a while. So I have been deliberately slowing down on my doctor’s advice. Which begged the question of what to do with my time. Today, I ended up watching the movie “Creation” on Amazon Prime video - an interpretation of Charles Darwin’s period of his life when he was trying to write and publish his book “The Origin of Species”. The movie had been a commercial failure apparently because the church stood against it in North America, but I enjoyed the interpretation based on his biography very much.

I could empathize with Darwin’s personal struggle between following his dogma taught by his religion and in presenting and writing about the patterns of facts that evolved from his anthropological observations and study of nature. The madness that comes from the pain of evaluating and doing something about the difference between God and nature; faith and science. The gaps that he saw in these two realities and what reality he could empathize with led him to write the book “The Origin of Species”.

And of course, it makes one think deeply when you watch a movie like this. Based on the above observations, I interpreted “creativity” as:

“Creativity” is creating something “new” to address the gaps in current external realities (based on known patterns and existing beliefs) with newly understood realities based on freshly observed (or hypothized) patterns, in an attempt to add or change known patterns/beliefs (to create some utility from it)

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PS: Of course, after writing this, I feel like I have borrowed this “reality” term from Goldratt and his ”Reality trees” but that realization came much later. And, I believe that Goldratt is too “linear” in his thinking. He believes in subsuming to one major “bottleneck” and I to as many “bottlenecks” you can govern or leverage on, all at the same time. So, two completely different schools of thought. Again, I believe the TOC model has some value some of the time in some contexts.