Creativity
“An optimist, finding the path to becoming a visionary”
That is what my Twitter profile reads.
Even though the path isn’t all clear yet, last week, another door to this vision was unlocked.
Grab a cup of tea, have your sit, hold my hand and get ready as we journey back in time.
On the 25th of December, 2015, right in the city of Abuja, while you were dining and whining wherever you were, I was seated in my cubicle, staring at the ceiling, observing as moments passed by. This period happens to be my NYSC and together with a few of my friends, we’ve fallen in love with the theory of incubating ideas, and the best way we do this is by looking for crazy and fascinating ideas in emerging fields and tweaking them. Eureka… A new idea that will save humanity is born.
We’d successfully done this for Periscope, Classdojo, and Edmodo ( may her gentle soul rest in peace).
On this very day, I wanted something different, a real idea. Not so long, a thought crossed my mind as I stare at the beam of the bright bulbs in my room. Who the hell came up with the idea of electricity? How on earth could someone just take a walk down the road and come back saying “I’m going to light up the world? What inspired the innovation of cars? How could someone think of putting a man on Mars with reusable rockets?
Well, maybe these people are time travelers who already experienced the future and are just cheats to us ordinary beings. Just maybe. I concluded as I shut down and sleep took me far away to wonderland.
Now, gently release my hand, we’re back to the present.
After 7 years, I got a clue and it’s CREATIVITY. Maybe these people aren’t time travelers, maybe they aren’t cheating, maybe they’re just more creative.
I know you’re thinking “what’s creativity and how does it align with these innovations”?
According to many, innovation is defined as the commercialization of creativity while creativity to me, is just the deep understanding of a complex problem such that you’re able to proffer solutions that may look impossible to others who lack the same understanding.
Creativity requires a bottom-up mentality. Understanding the whys of what makes things appear the way they do. It requires questioning reasonings. To become a disruptive innovator/leader, creativity has to be at the core of your character. Let’s see this example for clarity.
Cryptocurrency is an interesting field with lots of buzz. I was interested but knew less about how it works even though I’m into technology. Just like any idea seeker, I was looking for a cool crypto idea to plug into an existing product. This time though, I wasn’t going to steal an idea from https://cryptoideas.com (not sure if that site exists) and run away with it.
I wanted creativity to play a big part. So, what did I do?
I set on a journey to uncover the birth of cryptocurrency. This journey led me as far back as the regime of the first means of human transaction, trade by barter, to the gold exchange era, the first currency, the 1932 economic meltdown leading to the first great depression, the 1982 world debt crisis, the 2007–2009 global economic recession where millions lost their job, the world economic state that almost leads to another recession in 2013. I learned to understand that while all these economic events were happening, some technology experts were thinking differently to counter how the federal government handles public funds which open lapses that create a wider gap between the rich and the poor and leave an imbalance in the world distribution of wealth. Their quest for change eventually led to the first cryptocurrency in history.
Having dug deeper to understand the problem of money and the proposed solution in crypto-currency, I was more clear on what could become a success. In fact, most crypto ideas are just wannabe.
This is creativity at play. To become disruptive, you have to understand the basics, you have to become a master of the domain, and you have to rewind the hands to time and experience the raw problem. It’s no brainer that predictive AI needs as much historical data as possible to perform excellently. To predict the future, it is important to understand the past and creativity is at the center of this.
Dance with me, I’m one step closer to becoming a visionary. So are you too.
