Creative people are the ones who are always thinking of out of the box ideas and solutions. They can often see things that others miss or just don’t notice because they view the world through a very different lens. Creativity is one of the most important and valuable skills to have in business and the arts. It allows you to come up with innovative products and services that help people solve problems or simply enjoy themselves more. Creative people are also very hard workers who put in long hours and work tirelessly to achieve their goals.
If you have a creative personality, you probably have a lot of life experience that has landed you in some interesting situations. Creative people tend to be empathetic and can pick up on changes in other people very easily. Their openness and sensitivity expose them to a lot of pain and suffering but can also bring a lot of joy.
Creativity is a mindset that can be applied to almost any industry or job. You don’t need a specific degree to be a creative person, as many creatives are self-taught or learn on the job. In fact, in some industries like the tech sector a bachelors degree is now less and less required, instead you just need the necessary skills to do the job well.
A study by UCLA found that a group of creative professionals (writers, actors, visual artists and musicians) had the ability to engage in distant thinking. This means they can mentally travel to a place far away, as though it were happening right now. In contrast, the control group of doctors, lawyers and financial service professionals had trouble with distant thinking.
The researchers used fMRI brain scans to examine the differences in the two groups. They found that creatives had more activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for processing both mundane here and now events and more distant ones.
This may explain why creatives can focus more on distant events than the rest of us. They can put themselves in other peoples shoes and imagine what it would be like to experience things from a different perspective. This enables them to come up with ideas for new and imaginative solutions that would never occur to the average person.
Creatives have a high dose of libidinal energy and often show traits of both extroverts and introverts. They can be extroverted and outgoing in their public life but are usually quite private when they work on their creative projects. This can make them naive in some ways and they can be taken advantage of by others.
Creatives are often very proud of their achievements but they are also self-critical and objective about their own work. They are not necessarily rebellious in their approach to work but they do question the status quo and want to challenge conventions. It is this mixture of pride and humility that makes them so successful at what they do.