Where Your Creativity Comes From
“Ideas are like fish.” - David Lynch
Creativity is a relatively modern concept. For most of human history, people did not openly aspire to be ‘creative’.
Historically, calling yourself creative was an insult to God. Creation means bringing being out of nothing, and that was God’s act alone — creatio ex nihilo, a power so absolute that applying it to a person sat somewhere near blasphemy. Humans made. Composed. Discovered. Imitated. Creative acts were God’s domain.
The Greeks had no word for “create” in our sense at all: their art was mimesis, the imitation of nature, and even their maker-god, the Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus, did not create matter so much as arrange the chaos he found lying around.
So when a founder stands up and calls their work “creative”, they express the belief that the creating force is them. The idea of human-led creativity is barely a hundred years old. Alfred North Whitehead gave “Creativity” its most systematic metaphysical role in Process and Reality in 1929, treating it as the ultimate category of becoming and describing reality as “a creative advance into novelty.”
Here’s the big question: how do you know your ideas are really yours? Where do they come from?
Even if you believe in genius, it can’t take place without pre-existing conditions and support for creativity to flourish.
Philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that genius is the talent through which nature gives the rule to art. Read that slowly. The rule to art does not come from the artist. It comes through them.
Humans as Conduits
Nature is the source of creativity and it works through us. Humans are a conduit, a vessel for the divine act of creation. Genius doesn’t originate within. Ideas and sparks come from external sources and then take a life of their own inside us.
“The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him.” - Carl Jung
…Divine Transmissions?
This is a real nuance. Humans are not the cause or the center of creativity, but the amplifier, the reflection, the shepherd of a novel idea that begs to exist in the world. Many artists view themselves as servants to a creative higher power, as an antenna listening for divine transmissions.
Julia Cameron built The Artist’s Way around the idea that creativity is not invented by the ego but received through it: “Creativity is the natural order of life,” she writes, and there is “an underlying, in-dwelling creative force” moving through us.
Rick Rubin says the same thing in producer language: the artist is a vessel, a filter, and a listener. Jay-Z has described talent as “God-given,” something you draw from like a well.
Elizabeth Gilbert talks about ideas as living visitations that look for a human partner. Across forms, the artist is less a sovereign origin point than a tuned instrument.
McCartney’s “Yesterday” is maybe the perfect example of divine transmission. He said the melody arrived in a dream while he was staying at Jane Asher’s family home in London. He woke up with the tune intact, went straight to the piano, and tried to catch it before it disappeared. At first he was suspicious of it. It felt too complete, too given. He played it for people for weeks, asking whether they recognized it, because he assumed initially he had unconsciously stolen it from somewhere.
The song that McCartney created came out of somewhere else. He did not experience the song as his own doing. He first received the creative transmission, and then his work was to push it through into the world.
In the realm of entrepreneurship, Edwin Land, who built Polaroid, said the test of an inventor is the power to push something through in the face of staunch, dogged, even fanatical indifference. Notice the posture: not I am the source of this brilliance, but I am the one who will serve this thing through resistance. The work is the principal. Land is the agent. He is pushing through the idea.
“My brain is only a receiver. In the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration.” - Nikola Tesla
In the Tao tradition, there is a teaching for attracting and channeling creative energy. Ziran refers to a state of “just-so-ness” or “as-it-is-ness”, a quality of naturalness and spontaneity which can be seen as a specific personal virtue, as well as a description of the unfolding of natural processes.
With this the sage wants not wanting, does not value rare treasures; he learns non-learning. He returns to the places where others have passed by; he is able to help all things as they are (ziran), while in fact taking no action.[6]
The founder’s creative energy can’t be forceful: you locate where the thing wants to go and you serve the idea, exploring what it needs next to unfold naturally. Hannah Arendt called the human capacity to begin natality, and named it the only reliable miracle: that beginners keep being born, able to start what the world has not seen.
Seeing things with fresh eyes helps to spot where things want to go - and then follow their lead. So much of the creative skill comes down to listening better and doing less. Let ideas and opportunities come to you. Once they do, be open to receiving them and be ready to act decisively.
“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
Just showing up is a huge part of the creative work. That said, the most creative work comes from asking new questions that help keep your perspectives fresh. Showing up and working the same way each day will not make you more creative. Showing up daily AND actively exploring fresh avenues will make you unstoppable in the long run. Your job is to find what ideas want to exist most and push it through.
Rick Rubin puts it perfectly: the work has its own energy. The artist’s job is not to dominate it, but to notice the charge, follow it, and help the piece become what it is trying to become.
“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” - John Cleese