Inspiring creativity: open up your mind...

People consistently overrate themselves. In the USA, studies found that 65% of adults believed they were more intelligent than the average person. In one study following 178 drivers, up to 80% rated themselves above average on multiple dimensions of driving ability. In another, 94% of university professors rated their teaching ability as higher than average. Statistically, these are impossible results; by definition, 49.99% of participants must be lower than average. This provides a great demonstration of optimism bias in action.

In England and Wales, it's believed that around 42% of marriages will end in divorce, and yet on their wedding day every couple believes that their marriage will last the course. Optimism bias explains why we often think it’ll “never happen to me”, though research shows that we’re consistently poor at assessing future prospects, particularly when they relate to us personally.

Even when we know the odds, we judge our own chances as being better than average and on some occasions this phenomenon acts to our advantage; we apply for jobs beyond our current experience, we try new things that we know will stretch us and we take risks that can lead to great rewards. And sometimes it pays off; thinking positively really does work..!

When it backfires

But sometimes it works against us too, and this can certainly be the case when it comes to creativity. When a group of budding entrepreneurs were asked to assess the likelihood of their idea becoming a commercial success versus the ideas of others, a high proportion rated their own idea as being the most likely to succeed. In studies conducted by Christopher Sprigman at the University of Virginia, artists were asked to submit a painting to a competition and then, having viewed all the entries, to judge their personal chances of winning. On average, artists judged their own personal chances of success as 75%; in other words they thought there was a 75% chance that their artwork would be judged better than all the others.

Further research shows that our self-assessment accuracy in creative tasks is weakly correlated with actual creative performance, meaning that many people are poor judges of how original or creative their own work or ideas are.

Lessons learned

So although it can be hard to admit (because let’s face it, we’re brilliant…), we need to accept that sometimes other people’s ideas are better than our own. Creativity is as much about building on the ideas of others as it is about having new ideas of your own; in practice, creativity is a cumulative process which involves tweaking, adapting and combining other existing ideas. Interestingly, there are some who believe that truly creative ideas do not exist anymore - and that current creativity is simply blending existing ideas together in novel and exciting ways!

Rather than assuming that your own idea is the most creative, be open to the ideas of others and start from the position that all ideas are equally brilliant (and that none are bad)… Examine each idea on its own merits and look for reasons that support rather than defeat it. Look for ways of combining two different ideas to create something even better and never forget that even the best idea can usually be improved on if reviewed with a truly open mind.