Recently I realised something that sounds like it should be obvious, but isn't: there's a fundamental difference between creativity, in the sense of true originality, and technical talent, in the sense of being good at some selection of the arts or sciences.
We tend to think of creativity as a generic ability to build or imagine new stuff - probably in the arts, sometimes in engineering or the sciences.
But in fact technical creativity is mostly about copying existing techniques and practices - i.e. competently repeating what other people have done, perhaps with some minor twists.
Free original thinking/expression is an unrelated talent, and much less common.
You can have either, or neither. Only very rarely do you get both.
> technical creativity is mostly about copying existing techniques and practices - i.e. competently repeating what other people have done, perhaps with some minor twists.
> Free original thinking/expression is an unrelated talent
Unrelated? If you think the latter is completely unrelated, what do you think it involves?
We tend to think of creativity as a generic ability to build or imagine new stuff - probably in the arts, sometimes in engineering or the sciences.
But in fact technical creativity is mostly about copying existing techniques and practices - i.e. competently repeating what other people have done, perhaps with some minor twists.
Free original thinking/expression is an unrelated talent, and much less common.
You can have either, or neither. Only very rarely do you get both.