What would you say if I told you that creativity is a skill and not a gift?
Like any other skills, it can be learned and developed.

Many will be surprised to know that my mum is an accomplished and multi-talented artist. She is a French-Italian poet, interpreter, writer, editor. In the past, she has been a painter, a radio DJ, a dancer, an aerobic instructor, and many other things I can’t even remember.

Even if we discount the tiny possibility that my attitude towards creativity may have been genetically determined, my character has been powerfully influenced since early childhood.
In my family, we have always valued originality and worked extremely hard to develop our talents.

Although it might sound widely pretentious to state it here, I know I can be (and I have been) extremely creative.
Unlike my mum, however, I’m not an artist.
I’m a software developer, after all; I’m more technically inclined and definitely a bit rusty on poetry 🙂

I hopefully inherited her capability of creating ideas that can bring success in any field and personal life.
The problem with such attitude, however, is that you can only accept it for what it is – it’s not easy to develop a gift, is it?

The truth is that creativity can be learned and developed indeed, and it has nothing to do with intelligence.
Perhaps you knew this already, but I was surprised to make this discovery very recently and by pure coincidence.

Luckily, my motorbike broke.
On my new bus commute to work, I started speed reading creativity books voraciously.
I learned theories and ideas form Edward de Bono, Michael Michalko, Roger von Oech and many others.

I shared some of these findings with my team in our latest muffin morning, and will share them with you here, in my next few posts.
I will present some behaviors, mental models and tools that I found useful to organize thoughts and generate tons of ideas.

My dream is to evolve as a better thinker, to be original, maybe even revolutionary.
And I would love to share and help others to evolve too: my family, friends, coworkers, and, yes, perhaps even you.
I know, it’s just a dream, so please don’t judge me.
We are all allowed dreaming after all, although most of us have long forgotten how to.