On Creativity

Today I spent three hours, as part of my boss-endorsed Professional Skills Certification Program, in a video-conference room surrounded by materials to support the course ‘du jour’: namely, the Creativity and Innovation Effectiveness course.

This might be the least creative name for a course I’ve ever taken.

I was assigned homework prior to showing up this morning. It was comprised of a survey: seven sections of twelve questions each, whereby I was asked to rate statements on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being Least True and 5 being Truest (or something like that).

Example: Was I interested in lateral thinking? I googled “define lateral thinking” and came up with a Wikipedia entry telling me about the guy who coined the phrase. I decided if I didn’t know what it was, the answer was likely 1 or 2. I put 2.

Example: I take great interest in other people’s ideas. Hm. Well, that really depends, doesn’t it? There’s one attorney at the office who galumphs down the corridor with leftover cans of soda from his last meeting stuffed into all his pockets. Dude, they cost 60 cents at the vending machine. How badly do you need to save those $3? If his idea is to create a bottomless faucet that pours only Diet Coke, how much interest am I going to take? I’d venture a 1 on that one.

Example: Can I think of twenty ways to use a paper clip other than for its intended purpose? I came up with five. To be fair, I was a little rushed, having saved the survey for ten minutes before I had to leave work. All the same, I berated myself for only coming up with five, and - for the record - none of those included using it to scratch my inner ear. Someone else came up with that one.

Anyway, there I was in the training room, staring at the video-conference screen, shouting my scores back to them through our ceiling-hung microphones. It seems my creativity and innovation scores were pretty abysmal.

I thought, how far I’ve come from the days of pursuing a career in acting.

This is a dangerous road to go down. For starters, the pursuit of an acting career did not make me more creative, other than finding ways to manipulate my checking account to last me to my next paycheck. Being stressed about having no money and no career and a bummer of a boyfriend and a weird roommate does not lend itself to creative efforts. On the other hand, my most recent heart-to-heart at the office was with a woman twenty years older than me informing me of her high-sodium condition and how she could no longer eat soup.

One of the things I relished about the pursuit of acting - and I do make a distinction between acting and trying to make a living at it (the difference for me was about how much time I spent doing both) - was all the others just like me who were also struggling but reaching. The desire was there for all of us, and that was our shared language. Working full-time in the “real world” without the desire to be there means that I now share my days with two kinds of people: the kind where their aspirations match their jobs, and the kind where people have set the retirement alarm and it has been ticking down for years. “Eighteen more months,” someone said to me yesterday of his turning 65.

I chose to leave acting behind me because it was decidedly not making me happy, nor did it promise ever to do so. Now, I wait for that moment when I know what to do instead.

My company requires me to change my log-in password every eight weeks. The password is required to have no fewer than eight characters that must be comprised of numbers, symbols and letters, of which at least one should be lowercase.

THIS is where my creativity blooms.

My current password is Aha!in100. It’s shorthand: I aspire to have my Aha! moment - by which I realize my true calling - in 100 days.

Every morning upon logging in, I get a prompt: “Your password is set to expire. Do you want to change it?” I keep clicking on the ‘No’ button. I haven’t had my breakthrough yet.

In the meantime, I’m going to finish this certification course, spend too much time on Hulu and, if there’s any time left in the day, I’m going to come up with a new password.