CREATIVE GENIUS: Nature, Nurture... Or NASA?
What NASA's studies on visionary genius tell us about sustaining our innate creativity. Plus, a little quiz of our own.
During peak moon race fervor, NASA was obsessed with scouting and hiring creative geniuses because visionary and divergent thinkers brainstorm the best solutions. (i.e. space stuff)
They were so hyper-focused on recruiting and understanding this type of talent they commissioned a study on the nature of creative genius — is it rare? Is it inherent? Is it something we can nurture? Is it a skill to be trained?
The investigation used a creativity test originally designed for NASA recruits. Researchers administered the test to various ages — toddlers as young as three years old all the way up to adults.
Here’s the kicker: 98% of kids between three and five scored at the creative genius level. Okaaaay God mode toddlers.
But when tested at age 10, the percentage of geniuses dropped to 30%. By 15, only 12% of people scored at the creative genius level. After 18, just 2% of people measure as creative geniuses.
Before we know “how” to perform creativity, we pretty much all score as creative geniuses. The pilot light of creative genius still flickers inside of us, but rarely gets turned on as we become self-aware. It’s like the moment we become cognizant of how we’re expected to be creative, our intrinsic artistry plunges off a cliff.
Coincidence? Methinks no.
Media loves to shove the messy, flighty, unpredictable, “crazy” creative genius trope down our throats. It’s a persona a lot of us associate with being artistic… which ain’t a good thing. Like, why would we want to become the character that’s always the butt of the joke?
The embarrassing, one-note stereotype we’re force fed is woefully indicative of how our society values art and creativity in the free markets. (Therapy for all, I beg!)
We buff and smooth our prickly artistry into acceptable packages — “I make logos,” “I design websites,” “I edit podcasts,” “I take stock photos,” “I write sales emails.” In the process, our internal pilot light extinguishes for good.
To reignite the flame of creative genius, we need to lean into our personal creative archetype.
Because it’s not a Brandi Melville one-size-fits-all sweater. There’s not a singular way to be creative, and there’s definitely not a formulaic process to follow.
Sure, some creative geniuses are thermolabile, capricious, changeable chaos agents. Picasso famously had no schedule, no “process.” Go off, unstable queen!
And some are meticulous, calculating, measured, and disciplined. Haruki Murakami wakes at 4:00a and works for six hours straight when he’s in the thick of writing a novel. After his working session, he runs or swims, putters about doing sundry errands, and promptly goes to bed at 9p.
There’s a lot of space between those two extremes, but if Picasso and Murakami switched tactics, would either be as prolific? Probably not.
I spent the first third of my life studying other artists, trying to copy their exact tactics hoping it would lead me to the same outcomes.
It became necessary for me to show up to class 90 minutes early to stretch because I read somewhere ABT principal dancer Paloma Herrera was notoriously early.
My gnarled toes cried as I wrapped them with paper towels instead of toe pads and jammed them into pointe shoes… because that’s how Gelsey Kirkland did it. I sputtered down burnt black coffee from a styrofoam cup like my favorite writing teacher.
My alarm went off at 5a for months when I read that Toni Morrison used to rise at 5a, drink a coffee, and “watch the light come.”
Something always came from trying on the habits of others. I got a new understanding of my what my own process needed. But I’ve never been able to slip into someone else’s skin and have it transform into my own.
Which is where our creative archetype comes in.
Knowing your creative archetype gives you three advantages:
1. It helps you lean into your strengths and wield your superpowers.
2. It helps you compare yourself to other people and their processes more rationally. One person’s Perfect Portal Place is another’s Hellscape. My Holy Grail, this-inspired-me-to-become-an-artist painting looks like a pile of soggy cardboard to you. And that’s just fine.
3. It helps you push into the most effective areas of discomfort or challenge. My favorite choreography teacher used to give us the assignment to “dance the opposite” of our personal style to help us get unstuck when generating material. But you can’t do that if you don’t know your signature.
OK, how do we find our personal archetype? When we studied creative people — their strategies, challenges, public personas, workflow, worldviews, habits, vices, output, relationship to their work, relationship to the world — four clear areas of measurement presented themselves.
Within each category is a scale.
You might find yourself smack dab between the Ordinary and Special World, but tilted heavily toward Perfectionist tendencies with a knack for spatial processing and a slightly more mutable perspective. (You’d be a Reflector Archetype)
And by knowing all that, you have options. You have more doors to open. More doors mean fewer walls between you capital C Creativity.
As a Shapeshifter, I know I can lean into my loosey-goosey mutability for a lugubrious, what’s-a-boundary-I-don’t-know-her session. Or, I can challenge myself (this is where things get speecy-spicy) to play with rigidity in my practice. I also know that because I’m a spatial processing devotee, when I get stuck to my ankles in the gunk of an idea, it’s probably because I’m typing it on a 2D screen instead of seeing it in space.
We already talked about why all this matters — and my hunch is if we cozied up to our creative archetypes, we’d run into stubborn resistance less frequently. We’d excavate our inner genius and create more prolifically.
Or, maybe we’d just have another cute identity to add to our social media bios. Either way, sounds like a good time.
So, if you want to learn your creative archetype, I’ve got good news — you can take the SPACIES creative archetype quiz below and receive one of the 16 archetypes that we’ve identified.
I cannot wait to hear what you got. Let us know in the comments.
I once read that the reason China hasn’t done much technological innovation despite all of their resources is because kids aren’t really exposed to sci fi and science was emphasized in schools without creativity. It’s sometime I think about all the time
Michelle, I just want to share that I always enjoy your writing on so many levels. Not only is the core content immensely valuable, but the way you say it keeps my eyeballs delightfully glued to the page. Very excited to watch this project blossom!