Whiplashed by the Throes of Creativity

Brian over at BeanQuest links to this great website wherein a guy named Dave Devrie uses children’s sketches as the foundation for finished artwork. Apart from numerous violations of international child labor laws (just kidding, Dave…just kidding!), Dave’s work is delightfully creative. It also led me to think about the creative process and, much to the dismay of those who have some aberrant need to read every word published on the Gazette, to also write about it.

Primary vs. Secondary Creativity: A Brief History
During my previous life as a corporate drone, one of my peripheral responsibilities was to do college recruiting. This involved attempts to lure unsuspecting seniors into careers in corporate dronery, specifically in the area of accounting. Thrill-a-minute, adrenaline-pumping oil and gas accounting, to be exact. Our main competitors in these endeavors — aside from the other major oil companies — was the public accounting sector. I won’t go into the sordid little details of the depths we plumbed in our attempts to lessen the competition’s sheen, but we do need to focus for a moment on one strategy of particular relevance to the topic at hand.

The fellow who coordinated our on-campus efforts was named Joe A. Watson (the “A,” we were told, meant “Accounting,” in order to distinguish him from a fellow employee named Joe M. Watson, for whom the “M” meant “Machine” as he worked in the IT Department. Man, those were craaaaazy times.), and Joe was one of the all-time great lateral thinkers.

Joe came up with the idea of contrasting the work we did in private sector accounting with that in public accounting by classifying our modus operandus as “primary creativity” while those other guys were stuck in the obviously tedious and inferior “secondary creativity.”

(Note that we never realized at the time that there were actually technical definitions for primary and secondary creativity, the internet being only a vague concept, and the thought of doing any actual research being laughable. And it’s a good thing that our audiences were as ignorant as us, because in Maslow’s system, secondary creativity was superior to primary. But, I digress.)

In Joe’s construct, primary creativity (what we did) involved being the First Responder to problem situations. That in itself was a bit loose and difficult to prettify, so we instead focused on secondary creativity, which we defined as something along the lines of taking the work someone else did and fooling around with it. The obvious example (if you were an accounting student) was auditing, where Company A’s drones did all the exciting heavy-lifting, and the public sector auditors came in after the fact and <yawn> double-checked their work. Who in their right minds would want to do the latter — and for 70 hours a week, at that — when you could work in the comfortable confines of a Modern Corporate Office surrounded by the finest in Corporate Art and make Primarily Creative decisions until the cows came home, or 4:30 p.m., whichever came first.

Real World Creativity
While our “primary vs. secondary creativity” smackdown gained limited traction (which is just as well, as oil went to $8/barrel and our budget for new hires went to zero), I continue to believe that there’s some value in considering that dichotomy, albeit without the judgmental baggage we attempted to hang on it.

In point of fact, I consider myself to fall into the camp of those who are better at secondary creativity than primary. Frankly, I rarely have an original thought — even recognizing that in the cosmic scheme of things, nobody has original thoughts. But when given an inkling of an idea, or a proposal, or a snapshot…I think I’m pretty good at putting meat on the bone, of moving the ball across the goal line, of driving in the nail…in other words, of abusing every tired metaphor in the book.

I also think this has an analogy in the blogosphere. I even wrote about it, way back in Ought-Three, in a widely unread post where I classified every blogger in the world as either a Linker or a Writer, and then proceeded to attribute primary creativity to Writers and secondary creativity to Linkers. It’s all hogwash, of course, but sometimes you find yourself engaging in gross generalizations just for the heck of it.

And in Conclusion…
I’ve long since forgotten the original point I hoped to make in this post, which, if nothing else, confirms my status as a Secondary Creativitist. But if I had a point, it would likely be along the lines of suggesting that you might want to think about the concept of primary and secondary creativity (couched in the definitions I’ve used, not Maslow’s loftier and more legitimate ones) and see if they somehow apply to your own strengths. The idea here is to get comfortable with your creative gifts, regardless of where they fall along the spectrum. The product of creativity is uniformly pleasing and helpful, regardless of its origins and I, for one, would like to celebrate it.