Is creativity mainly about stealing ideas from others?

Creativity is a combination of inspiration and originality. We are constantly deriving from previous works and seeking to improve upon them, or twist and add upon them to create a whole another category. Regurgitating or stealing would imply that the work has simply been processed and spit back out in the same (or lesser) form, which is definitely not true. We take in ideas or methods that already exist, yes, but we also produce a better, new form of it.

Creativity is partly about stealing, borrowing, and assimilating. But what makes it creative is how we personally interpret syles and works that have already been done. The changes and decisions we make when creating is what makes it new. And sometimes, something just inspires us to create and we create something completely new and different.

To steal from Albert Einstein: “The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”

True creativity comes from within. We can learn and study the masters who came before us but sooner or later we must branch out on our own. It is true that there is nothing new under the sun but we can reshape it, modernize it and make it special and unique for our generation. An artist may travel to Paris and study all the great impressionists but he or she won’t get recognized until they show their own style. While listening to the radio artist with distinctive voices get our attention when they sing their first note we know it is them because we recognize their uniqueness.

I get some of my best design ideas from seeing other people stuff and thinking “that would be awesome if [blank]” and then I go and change it to my liking which in turn gives me even more ideas until finally what I ended up with looks nothing like what I started with.

According to Willie Nelson, if you steal from enough people you’ll eventually come up with something new.

Not “stealing” from others, but building on it or adjusting it.

I think creativity is about knowing a lot of different ways of doing things, and then putting them together in a way that’s appropriate for the problem you are solving. Sometimes someone else has put things together in the same way, and sometimes it’s a new thing. No matter what, I think it’s important to acknowledge your sources.

We all stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us. It takes nothing away from our efforts to acknowledge that. Personally, I feel like my creativity has very little to do with any of my own work. It is all based on other people’s work. Sometimes there are so many people’s work involved that I don’t know who to credit, but it never feels like I’ve done very much that is truly new.

It’s not stealing if you acknowledge your debt. It’s using, and it’s perfectly acceptable—even desirable. I think people believe a myth that creativity is some magic spark that only a few people have. I think that’s bullshit. If people didn’t stop themselves by believing this, I think everyone would conceive of themselves (so to speak) as creative.

I’ve been told that I’m creative, and this always causes me some discomfort, because it seems to me that others think that creativity is special, and I think it isn’t. I think that creativity is more about stopping criticizing yourself (and others) than anything else. One of my favorite things to do is to get people together to toss around ideas and build off each others ideas. I just take notes. Funny thing. I often get the credit for the idea, even though all I was doing was writing down what other people said.

Now, having said that, the people I enjoy the most are the people who are like that. I also like experimentalists—people willing to try things in different ways, just to see what will happen. Again, all of this builds on the work of others. I think of the people I like as “creative” people. However, there isn’t much difference between them and others, except they seem to be more open-minded about considering ideas and putting them together in experimental ways.

P.S. Love the question!

For me a lot of creativity is in seeing unexpected connections among things. Sometimes they come about metaphorically, and sometimes they occur more by just letting things drift around in the eddies of my mind and seeing which ones bump into each other.

Sometimes the elements or endpoints are my own, sometimes they are from life experience or from the natural world, and sometimes they are someone else’s. In the end they are all taken in by the perceptive faculties and transformed by the individual mind. How can we say who owns them?

Also my way of looking at things is often back-end-to. When I go someplace, I frequently and habitually turn back to see how the route will look going the other way. I think this stems from a childhood fear of getting lost (I never would have trusted the breadcrumbs; I’d have wanted to know the look of the trees and how they pointed to home). Turning things over, looking at things from beneath or behind, trying the steps in reverse order, doing the pencil puzzle maze from “finish” to start” (always easier in the wrong direction!), pushing the button that says “don’t push”—these are the kinds of things that often produce original results for me.

I think creativity just means having your own thoughts and ideas and just being original with how you use them or act upon them.