I used to think I wasn’t creative because I wasn’t an artist or musician. That was creativity to me.

Nevermind that I spent a significant part of my childhood with an imaginary friend named Anderson, or that my best friend and I played “bank” where we created money, checks, and a teller line and we waited on pretend customers, or that in middle school a friend and I developed a man’s entire life story just for fun. I never claimed to be an ordinary child, clearly.

Those things, among many other random things I did, required a lot of imagination and creativity. But at no point did I look at my life and see creativity. I mostly saw a weird kid, but let’s not get into my self-perception issues.

Now I know that creativity is about so, so, so much more than just making art or music. Any new idea about anything is creative.

One of the definitions of creativity is: the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.

Whoa.

That’s a lot. And it sounds kind of daunting. But it really isn’t.

We transcend traditional patterns of life every single day. We take new routes to work when accidents leave traffic at a standstill. We make up dinner with just the food in our fridge. We find some sort of tool, anything really, that will get the broken cork out of the neck of the wine bottle. That is all creativity. (It’s also problem solving, but we’ll talk about that later.)

Think about all of the things you have done today that wasn’t just your same old routine. Creativity! Bam!

Don’t be like I used to be, not seeing your own creativity and imaginative power. It’s all around you, if you just realize it.

So tell me, how were you creative today? Leave a comment and let me know.