How to Be Creative

The 21st century is the century of innovation. And I think in this century the most valuable thing is creativity. So what is creativity? What are the ingredients of creativity?

You know, there are some people who believe that creativity is the preserve of the exclusive few. That only artists and inventors have creativity. And the vast majority of people are not creative. And then you have the distinction between the left-brained people and the right-brained people. I don’t believe in that. I believe creativity is something that exists in all of us, in greater or lesser degree.

It’s just that some people know how to channel their creativity. They know how to open the parachutes of their mind. And others, you know, just believe that they don’t have creativity and they don’t use something that is given to all of us. So what is creativity? Creativity to me is ordered imagination. You know, there are things out there.

There’s a lot of chaos. And if you can create order out of that chaos and create a new product, it could be a book, it could be a novel, it could be a product in the sense of a new software or whatever. Then that’s creativity. And what are the ingredients of creativity? I talk about what I call the three Cs.

So the first C is curiosity. Now curiosity is very important because curiosity means finding out new things. Apples had been falling on people’s heads for centuries. But why did it take a Newton to discover the theory of gravitation? Because Newton was curious, as William Hazlitt put it: “millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why. ”

So I think curiosity is very important. And curiosity means actively exploring your environment, constantly asking the question why? If I take my own example. I wrote my first book, Q&A, when I was 42 years old. And it all started with an inspiration that came to me from a project in India called Hole in the Wall.

Now, in this project, a group of computer scientists, they adjoined a slum. So they actually put a hole in the wall, which adjoined a slum, and they put a freely accessible computer with a touch screen facing the slum. And then they said, let’s observe what happens. And they discovered that within three months, children living in that slum started using that computer without any teachers, without knowing a word of English, without having gone to school.

And when I read about this, to me it felt incredible. How can a slum kid use a computer? And I thought to myself, if a slum kid can use a computer, then a slum kid can also participate in a brain quiz and win. And that’s how Q&A was born, which, as you know, later became Slumdog Millionaire. So curiosity is very, very important.

The second thing that you need is confidence, because you are testing out something new, something novel, something which has not been done before. So you have to have confidence in that product. If you yourself don’t believe that you know what you have created is something really good, then how will the rest of the world consider it good?

So I think that confidence is very, very important. But that confidence must come from a bedrock of diligent practice and hard work. There are no substitutes to hard work. So in today’s generation, there are many people who believe that there are lots of shortcuts available. We get on to reality TV, you know, we do something outrageous, take off our clothes and we’ll be instantly famous.

But there are only two places where success comes before talent. One is the dictionary. The other is Big Brother. But in the real world, you actually need hard work, hard work and hard work to achieve success. So confidence is very important. And the third thing you need is a computer.

Well, it could be a computer. It could be a library. It could be anything. Because you need to do a lot of research. Especially as a novelist, you know, when I’m writing about things that I don’t know nothing about. Then the only way I can create an authentic backdrop is if I use a computer to do that research.

And that’s why if you look at my first novel Q&A, I have thanked Google because Google has made research so much easier. So I think if you have a combination of these three, you have curiosity and natural curiosity to explore your world, to always ask that question why? If you have confidence that yes, what you are doing with that curiosity, creating a new product is something that has international relevance, wider relevance.

And thirdly, you have a computer for your research. Then I think you have all the ingredients to be a successful creative person.