“Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” 

-Leo Burnett

About 200 years ago, who would’ve ever thought that flying machines (airplanes) would exist? How would you describe the invention of airplanes? I call it creative. Humans have come up with a lot of creative things. You probably have creative inventions lying around everywhere in your house. Example: books are the result of creative thought and the creative invention of the printing press. So, what is creativity anyway?

Creativity is based, I think, partially on associative memory. That’s just a fancy way of saying that creativity depends (to a certain extent) on your ability to find connections between unrelated items. Let’s play a game based on associative memory. I’ll say three words, and you can try to guess a word that relates all three. The word-groups are listed, and the answers are shown beneath that.

• dew, comb, bee
• dress, dial, flower,
• child, scan, wash

I don’t know about you, but the third bullet point was much harder for me than the first bullet point. This is probably because the last two bullet points have words more unrelated than the first one. You may have seen dress and flower in the second one and thought that it might be something girly, but then where in the world did dial come from? And in the third one, the words, “child,” “wash,” and “scan,” are typically thought of in completely different contexts. I’m pretty sure a person with a really good associative memory would be able to guess the answers correctly more often (of course, this isn’t some official test for your associative memory; I’m no psychologist!)

Going back to the quote at the top of the page: “curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” If you’re curious about various things, you’re going to have more ways to think about one concept. Objects can fit into more context. When you played the game, the more contexts you could think of the more answers you could guess. Think of a light bulb. Some people think of the light bulb as an invention which gives light using electrical currents, some people see it as an invention which allows us to have a social life after nighttime, some people see it as an invention as progress from candlelight, and some people see it as a symbol of creativity/ideas/intelligence, and some people…

The list goes on and on. Creativity is being able to pull all these facts and pull them together in new ways. I like to think of creativity as a puzzle, except that the same pieces can form an infinite number of pictures. But if you’re curious and explore all the different types of pieces; the red ones, the small ones, the circular shaped ones, you’re more likely going to be able to figure out how to combine the pieces into new pictures.

You may still be asking, why curiosity? Why does the quote say curiosity is the key to creativity, instead of just broad general knowledge? Doesn’t it look like the more base knowledge you have, the more building blocks you’re going to have to build a tower? But there’s a catch in this logic. While you do need foundational knowledge, if you’re not curious, you may look at uncertainty in a bad way. In fact, you may even avoid uncertainty and instead choose to believe easy explanations. If you look at new things with an open mind though, you’re making your mind ready to accept new concepts and ways of problem-solving.

In short, curiosity is the golden key to unlocking our creativity.