Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
The other day, while looking through my wife’s collection of books, I came across a small book called “SHIT HAPPENS, so GET OVER IT.” It comprises a series of thought-provoking quotations by famous and not-so-famous personalities. A George Bernard Shaw quotation caught my attention. I paused and felt thoughts crystallizing around “creating yourself.”
I had a challenge some years ago. I could see being 69 years old (and retirement) coming. After 69 years old, could I create a self-identity independent of a medical practitioner or professor? Could I structure the post-retirement unstructured time into the most exciting time of my life?
Expressions such as “creative writing,” “creative thinking,” “creative solutions,” or even “creative accounting” are intriguing. The essence of creativity, however, had for years eluded me. Fortunately, my 18-month stint in business school gave me glimpses into creativity’s mysteries.
In one of our seminars, the professor posed a challenging question: What is the difference between being creative and innovative? We soon got entangled in “definitions” and “semantics.” The seminar marked the beginning of my ongoing search for further clarity.
Perhaps we could begin at the beginning – at the first phase of problem-solving – by generating all kinds of ideas to address a problem. Whether these ideas are helpful or not should not bother us at this stage. We do that all the time. We are all creative.
Creativity is only meaningful when we can articulate what we want to solve. In other words, creativity is problem-oriented. The clearer we can state the issue, the more likely we can create a solution. Framing the problem is often surprisingly difficult. It usually takes months to craft it. In research, we call it “the research question.”
The second stage of problem-solving involves critical thinking. Critical thinking evaluates ideas generated by creative thinking and makes a judgment – on what to accept, reject or accept ideas for further deliberations.
The third stage is crucial because it involves executional excellence. In the business world, innovation creates solutions of commercial value – people are willing and happy to pay for them. Being innovative is transforming the accepted ideas (in the second stage) into actionable solutions.
So, life isn’t about finding ourself. Life is about creating ourselves. However, creating ourselves is an ongoing project, a lifelong work-in-progress undertaking. It only ends when life ends.
Vince
Dr Vincent Chong is a retired Professor of Radiology at Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore.
