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The Truth Behind Being a Creative Person

Picasso, Churchill, Balenciaga, Tiffany, Edison

Creativity is inherent in all of us. We are, by our nature, creators. All of us can, and most of us do, create in one way or another. We are undoubtedly at our happiest when we create something and put it out into the world.

Unfortunately, many of us use excuses for not creating such as: “I am not creative or talented enough.” But it is not right. After studying personalities such as Jane Austin, Picasso, Edison, Tiffany, Churchill, I realised that creativity and talent is a byproduct of courage and relentless work.

Every person on the planet is creative. We all have it because we are all the same. The personality and individuality is a matter willingness to discover what’s inside of us and work on it until perfection. Thus, in short, we become a creative person.

As I mentioned, courage is directly linked with creativity and innovation. But the best definition is offered by Paul Johnson:

I did set myself on a small quest to understand what is creativity and why some people were able to change the course of history through their creations. What led them to what they have been creating? Was there any secret sauce behind their work? How some people do take place in history, and others don’t?

In the end, I discovered a harsh truth — it is hard work on a daily basis for an indefinite amount of time with no guaranteed result. As Johnson wrote, you have to be able to fight time and any disability you may have. Beethoven, had to fight his lacking power of hearing. Edison had to fail thousands of times before he came to the final version of the light bulb. Wagner lived in poverty and constantly begged for cash. Emily Dickinson wrote her poems despite any encouragement, or response from the public, working in isolation and solitude.

And what amazes me the most when studying different personalities is that every creator is always creating work based on his predecessors. Nobody creates work from nothing. This was a stereotype for me for a long time. So let’s dive into short stories about creators and see how they worked and what made them so special.

“If I am not talented enough and there is a lot of competition then I will create a painting a day until the world will know me as the greatest painter alive. This had to be one of the principles of Picasso when he set on the road to becoming the most successful artist in the history.

Born in Malaga, Spain, the only starting knowledge in painting was given by his father. For the rest we can easily say that Picasso was self-taught, self-promoted and educated through the streets of the cities he lived in. From an early age, he always kept a sharp eye on the market. Thus he always knew what will sell.

While some people have been waiting for the inspiration to come and looking for God to show their talents, Picasso worked on a daily basis. His chief work principle in life was speed over accuracy and effort. He, was one of the most restless and experimental creators we’ve ever known. Everything he did, had to be done at top speed. He wasn’t capable of taking care of his work.

Picasso tried everything and did every job he could put his hands on. Besides painting, he also did sculpture, facial masks, and was a master of his craft, whether on canvas or paper, in stone or ceramics, or metal. No material was a barrier for him. We can easily say he was an experimentalist, and changed his style every decade. He was not afraid to disrupt himself.

He also designed posters, logos, advertisements, theatre costumes and dresses. After his death, the number of his creations exceeded 30,000 and there is a source for that (catalogue raisonne — 1932–1978). Picasso was a man of quantity, ferocious work ethic and experimentations.

You would not expect a political person on the list, but it was not hard to decide. Besides that he was a prime minister and earned his place in history after WWII, he deserves to be on the list because he was also a painter and a master of words.

How did he get into writing? After the death of his father, he had grief and could not find his place and peace of mind. So he decided to write an entire biography dedicated to his father, after which he discovered the love and passion for words. Churchill did not know what creativity was, he knew only the words “hard work”.

Few people know that in his entire lifetime he wrote more than 10 million words. The number includes his speeches, books and articles. This is more than any writer ever wrote. He wrote about anything and everything he was interested in or took part in. And this habit gave him only benefits from a young age.

Not only he developed the skill of writing, but also made money from it. Every time he went to a different country or war, he wrote about it and sent back home articles that were sold to newspapers or journals. After the WWII he wrote three books and is the most extensive information about that period, containing more than two million words.

When he was not writing, having fun or fighting politics, he was painting. He discovered, as other sensible people have done that painting is not only the best of hobbies but a sure refuge in time of trouble. Because while you are painting you can think of nothing else. Thus you can relax your mind.

He never evaded hard work. He worked hard at everything of his best ability: parliament, administration, geopolitics, writing books, painting, creating an idyllic house and garden. This person was a creator in his blood, due to his big ego. He loved, if possible, to see all things done by himself and that’s what separated him from other personalities of his days.

Out of all creative people, Cristóbal Balenciaga was the most dedicated creator to the business of making beautiful things. Work absorbed him in every aspect of his life, and there was room for nothing or no one else.

How did he get into fashion? At the age of three, he joined a sewing class and showed great passion at it. For the next 74 years, he could, and did, sew superbly. He kept his hand sharp by doing a piece of sewing every day for the rest of his life. Balenciaga was the only designer at the time who did everything by himself when it comes to dresses. He did sew, cut, choose materials, everything that involved creating a dress. The only thing he could not do is drafting, which an assistant helped him.

He was working so much and barely got out of his studio, that people even doubted if he ever existed. They thought Balenciaga was a pseudonym. There were almost no interviews with him, and very few people saw him. There are virtually no photographs of him. He never went out into the society. He also hardly ever dined out, except with one or two old friends.

All of this came as a price for him to be able to focus on creating timeless work. Continually working and creating. That’s why almost no designer nowadays can create something like what he did from the days of 1950' and 1960' or as others call it — museum-like quality work.

He worked fanatically hard. Each collection had between 200 and 250 design, all of which he completed himself because he had very few assistants he could trust the quality of work. He even declined the help of the young and talented Hubert de Givenchy.

From the day he was three until the last days of his, he tried his best to work everyday. Only when he stopped working, during the hard times of 1960’s, he retired and died of a broken heart.

Louis Comfort Tiffany was obsessed with making windows and lamps out of glass. He came to glassmaking through jewellery. His father Charles Lewis Tiffany, born in 1812, set up a shop in New York in 1837 selling stationery and fancy ware. He seems to inherit his father’s tastes, mixing the extraordinary with the ordinary.

Tiffany was a true creator that was always experimenting, and delighted in setting himself impossible tasks. Even though his father was a businessman, he studied painting in his early days. But he was also, by nature, and organiser, a leader and a businessman — a lavish spender and collector. If it is to offer a definition, Tiffany was a creator facilitator, a man who made it possible by his vision and organising ability for others.

At the beginning of twentieth century, he was employing more than 100 best in class glass workers and was encouraging them to test their own ideas. Ideas that will allow him to researching with his chemistry devision.

He was using his jewellery workshops to produce special metal effects. These combined with coloured glass led to “jewel vases”. He was constantly studying ancient pieces of glass he had picked during his travels or museum visits. He was looking to find effects which he could chemically reproduce.

Tiffany Jr. had an unsettled desire for discovery and experimentation, allowed him to create things that are valued more than a million per piece nowadays. He was always traveling to different countries and studying ancient cultures that worked with glass. He kept a lot of findings from these travels or notes from his museum visits.

An important note here is that Tiffany enjoyed collaborating with others or getting inspired from other styles, but he never copied. He wrote:

He also developed rich glass with a rough surface that he later called Lava, inspired by fragments he found near Vesuvius. His studies of antiquity found that tiles buried for 2,000 years in ashes (as at Pompeii) underwent chemical changes, producing lusters which he could reproduct in his factory. He was soon selling more tiles that vases.

Sometimes you think that to be a creator, you have to be an artist, but you can’t be more wrong. Thomas Alva Edison, an inventor and businessman, has behind his back more than 1,000 patents. A majority of them have played a crucial part in developing our modern world. And most of them come from the desire of solving needs of others and collaborating with artists.

He was inspired giving people what they did not know it was possible to create. For example, one of his inventions, the first recording machine or phonograph was inspired from the voices of great singers and instrumentalists. He wanted to give them better tools to create.

The same goes for his improvements with electricity. He believed in cooperation with other creators and artists. He inspired Tiffany to change from gas to electric lamps, which sold way better and more. Later he joined forces with Tiffany to design New York’s first all-electric theatre that helped many dancers to boost their careers with new possibilities.

His laboratories looked more like a painter’s workshop rather than a scientist’s one. And sometimes he got so obsessed with work that he would sleep in his cloths on the floor only not to lose his creative flow. And his famous quote, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, sums up his entire work ethic. Being a creator is not a title, it is a way of life.

There is a saying that inspiration is for amateurs, and the rest of us get back to work. And how much I wouldn’t want this to be true, there is no other way around. Or as a friend of mine said: “You can’t be and stay inspired if you don’t consume information”. And by information he meant reading books, watching movies, listening to music, going to galleries, talking to smart and interesting people, travelling and exploring a new country. This is consuming information. Then once you consumed, you have to create and give something back to the world.

After reading these short stories about creators and their principles, we can see that all are similar in one thing only — hard work. All creators had a motto for life — keep creating. Anything else was part of their personality.

Being a creator is not a title, but a way of life. It is not something that you do today and tomorrow you leave aside because you are tired. It is not a hobby. Being a creator is your life.

We do not need some particular godlike inspiration to create something extraordinary. Everything is around us, and true creators are always in search for consuming information. Whether it can be found in nature, different country, books, movies, music, food, or collaborating with artists or other creators like you.

It is also important to notice, that creators are usually egotistical when it comes to their work. They do not allow other people to do their jobs because all of them want to be sure it is done correctly (their own way). Also, it is because they love to create their own lives, rather than allow others to do it for them. And of course, in most modern environments, being egotistical when it comes to your work is not practical and efficient. But everybody has his way. Some are facilitators, and some are work dictators.

P.S. Of course there are many more great creators that deserve to be written about (men and women). The list is a personal preference.

As a source of inspiration and information I used three books written by Paul Johnson which offer great, short and well written biographies and essays about famous people. The books are: Creators, Churchill, and Heroes.

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