Hey guys,
So #showerthoughts: What Really Is Considered Being Creative?
My supreme ability to make crappy and dank jokes might be considered creative because they might have never been seen before (or at least that I didn't know it before the creation of it). I would consider that creative.
But hold on. Take a step or two back. How did I come up with them? How did I come up with the blogging ideas for this math blog you're on? How did I come up with the traffic differential equations? How did I come up with things? In the process of creating, what EXACTLY are we doing?
My answer to that is:
We did not create entirely new things
I believe that in the 21st, 20th, 19th, ..., 0th century, we did things based on something else. We surely did not make something up ENTIRELY new. If you came up with something so new, that it's not based on anything before, then you basically built up from nothingness, and I don't think the world built up from nothingness. Homo sapiens landed on the Earth, and not the way around. We build our capabilities upon what's existing. When we created fire centuries ago, it's more like we used the things on Earth like wood sticks and coal, and not from bare nothingness from the deep deep black hole or wherever. Hence, it's pretty contradictory to say that creativity is the ability to create something to be entirely new.
AND so if someone says something is entirely new, shut them up and correct that "ENTIRELY" to "PRETTY" or something of that sort.
So, creative things are built on some things that we know
How does that help?🤔
Well, for sure, creativity is defined as the capability of creating or recognizing new ways to do things. We basically diverge from the common and convergent way(s). Now this divergence can be uselessly harmful or usefully beneficial.
One big thing I learned during the Rustic Pathway's Critical Issues Summit 2019 was that to fight some issues in our world today, we may need not much divergence. We don't need to create some new start-ups in hope to save the world, and I came in with exactly that thought. We should look at a potential solution to a problem in its effectiveness.
Divergence would be harmful, because sometimes you can't guarantee it will work itself to save lives like you thought it might. With the Water Hyacinth Project, I thought I would create some sort of propelling turbine to drive the WHs away from the river, but it turned out as a pretty dumb idea I came up with.
If I shoo'ed the WHs away, I would miss out on the fact that WHs can be used to convert to a biofuel, releasing up to 57% methane gas from itself during anaerobic digestion in the bio-digester. Now, I would be generating fuel at an affordable price to the villagers, thus giving them a lee-way from the costs of having not used biofuel otherwise. From that, moving WHs out of Prek Toal exhibits benefits that it stopped much oxygen-deprivation of the water and thus allow fishes to swim back to PT, ease commuting, and control the amount of pollution caused by dead WHs. We missed out the part that we would be able to use them as fuel, which can bring revenue in for Osmose--a local NGO--and further drive current projects by the organization.
The more important part is that we don't even need to create something new, which takes time to actually build one, prototype it, test it to see any failures, then go back to prototyping all over.
We can just go with buying a bio-digester, and put it in PT with some costs like building houses. That's exactly what we're planning to do. In about 2 weeks from now, we will receive additional informations on the next steps to take, and skyrocket our project for real from there.
This is an example where creativity might not just work as well as it's alternative. We simply don't crack a nut with a sledgehammer. You end up destroying the "inner goodness" instead of getting it. You end up missing out the real impact that is the goal of whatever issue you're trying to solve.
However, the idea of using WHs in bio-digester to create biofuel is creative, because we thought bio-digesters would only use animal's manure to release methane. We found a way to work around the problem of reducing the pollutant content in PT's river water.
It's also creative in that I found out the novel way of solving the problem. When I pitched the idea to some of the people in the trip, they called it irrelevant. They went on to target other ways such as promoting tourism in PT in order to raise awareness and bring in money for Osmose, or providing more sustainable jobs for the people.
Those proposals are all well, and I don't wanna go on a b e e f with those people because I respect the values they put up in order to tackle for a solution to the issue.
It just happens that I see what they missed out on--the fact that the WHs could have done all of it (if you're interested, go to my last blog before this one) and I gotta admit that not having my glasses on that day opened my tiny eyes about WHs being the root of all it instead of half-blinding my "vision" LOL (shoutout to hostmom Peng Chang and hostdad Hong Da for finding my glasses that probably floated under our floating house that night).
And so, I diverged from the norms. Is that creative?
I think YES
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