I’m writing this as a kind of response to my friend Mark’s blog entry about creativity, in which he wonders if the use of that word in a business context is making it into a buzzword (and therefore meaningless).

I take Mark’s point that the C-word is being carelessly thrown around in business (along with its more industrial sounding synonym, “innovation”). I don’t work in a suit and tie/MBA kind of business environment, so I am blissfully free of most current buzzwords, at least the ones that you find in that world.

I have however worked for a long time around corporate environments that have a marketing and advertising component, and a word that you will often see there is “Creative” with a capital C. As in, we have a Creative department. Need something creative done? Ask them. We’re going to get back to identifying new opportunities by leveraging synergies.

This has never made much sense to me, especially knowing as I do how little real creativity actually goes into most graphic design, advertising, copywriting, and other such work. Not that the people who work there aren’t talented artists- although some aren’t- it’s just that there usually isn’t time, money or interest in doing anything really original or interesting. Conversely, a great deal of creativity goes into many so-called executive or line of business activities, from developing a business plan in the first place to hiring and deploying staff or managing the finances (not to be confused with “creative accounting,” which is not desirable). What would you rather have- a Creative department, or a creative business culture?

So what is creativity, really? There is a cultural mystique around the term, associating it with some special, superhuman quality. We think of Pablo Picasso paying for meals with sketches, of Thelonius Monk playing a solo. We think “those guys are geniuses- I could never do that.” Well, maybe we can and maybe we can’t, but we probably won’t, because we don’t have the same passion and confidence that made those guys get to the level of proficiency that they had.

We romanticize painters and actors and musicians and other performers because they are doing what they do in public, and that requires a level of confidence that most of us do not have- an almost pathological certainty that what they do is awesome, and anyone who doesn’t get it is clueless. The truth is that painters and performers go through a process that most of us don’t with regard to their work: critique. In art school you make a painting, put it on display and the rest of the class tears it apart. You learn your strengths and weaknesses and develop a thick skin at the same time- or you quit. If you stick with it- if you do it because to not do it is like not breathing- that is passion. It is not something that only special people or geniuses have; everyone has passion for something. Just not necessarily the fine arts.

Mark also recently mentioned a book that I have used quite successfully called The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. It is ostensibly about releasing one’s creativity through a series of strategies like affirmations and writing the morning pages, which I used to do before I started blogging; but the truth is that these exercises, and I’m guessing most creativity seminars, are in fact about building confidence. After all, it is hard to develop passion for a pursuit of any kind if you don’t have the confidence to try it in the first place, and stick with it until you feel like you know what you’re doing.

Art is often defined as anything that we produce which is not essential to our survival or reproduction. Many animals have the ability to create things that aid in both, like a beaver dam; but the ability to create things artfully, and/or for their own sake, is what we consider human.

So there you have it: creativity = confidence + passion, applied artfully to an area of interest. Creativity is universal, whether it is expressed in painting or acting or pro wrestling or parenting or cooking. Like having children or the five senses, it is an everyday miracle of our existence that we don’t appreciate until it seems that we are incapable of doing so.