[Editor's Note] What Makes Creativity?

People have long been interested in the question, "What makes a winner?" Various efforts to measure capability have included the intelligence quotient, emotional quotient, moral quotient, and physical fitness quotient. Now we have the "creativity quotient" as well.

The creativity quotient is now getting a lot of attention because it is of increasing importance to business. Be it research and development that starts from scratch, improvements in the production process, ideas for packaging, or even unexpected advertising approaches, in every link along the business chain creative ideas can turn just another product into a sensation. After its moment of glory, it will be replaced by something even hipper, and vanish from memory.

This profit-centered perspective on creativity reflects the constant desire for novelty in modern society. People today demand constant innovation, and want the products they use to have ever-more functions, to be easier to figure out, and to be more aesthetically pleasing, in order to feed the seemingly insatiable craving to consume.

But on the other hand, the promotion of creativity certainly does make contemporary society more diverse and interesting. Thus some school principals try to inspire a greater love of learning in their students with a performance of ballet. Or powerful political and business leaders are delighted to join in a costume show during New Year office parties. Even corpses, not normally put on public show, can be shaped and sculpted into all kinds of forms and go on a global tour. These days, nothing seems so strange that we are shocked by it, and any idea, no matter how bizarre, has its day. Freedom seems to be at a new high.

Experts say that creativity by definition means going against the grain and breaking the rules. To be creative, you must dare to rebel, and, so long as you do not impinge on the rights of others, courageously express your own outlook and take pride in what makes you unique.

Moreover, if a creative idea is not immediately put into practice, then it is wasted. Going from creative ideas to practical applications takes very pragmatic skills, like patient experimentation and testing, requiring total focus and concentration. As the classical poet Tao Yuan-ming declared, "When swept by a thought, I gladly forget to eat." And Thomas Edison is said to have once absent-mindedly cooked his own watch rather than the egg he intended.

Then the question is, does our education system encourage children to go against the grain, or permit them to break the rules? I'm afraid the answer is no. In a recent book, film director Ang Lee, who comes from a famous family of professional educators, recalls that when he was a small child it was considered cute when he picked up a broom and pretended to be playing guitar for the entertainment of family guests. But when he was studying film in college, and exhausted himself for a performance tour, his father, who always hoped he would get a PhD and become a professor, reacted with a scoff: "What is all this nonsense?!"

Does our education system permit children to relax and to invest their energies in those things they enjoy? The answer is similarly in the negative. Parents in Taiwan seem most worried that their children will "waste time," and therefore pack their progeny's schedules with school classes, after-school education, and courses in music and the arts. Kids don't have the least opportunity to figure out what it is they really like as individuals. Gerald Durrell, author of My Family and Other Animals, never had single day of formal schooling, but enjoyed a childhood in which he had no particular goals set for him and could follow his own interests entirely. In this setting, he developed a deep love and understanding of animals and changed world conservation history. What would have happened to Durrell if he had been born in Taiwan?

Our cover story this month focuses on "creativity education," something that schools at all levels have recently been energetically promoting. Intelligence has long been quantified for practical, collective purposes, but the emphasis in that kind of quantification has always been on innate intelligence or on the instrumental purposes to which the mind can be put. However, in our story we focus on individual uniqueness and creativity, something that cannot be judged by some immediate practical application, and must be nurtured in a different way.

Finally, we need to remind ourselves that, with new models of behavior all around us, we don't need to follow like sheep. If we draw our attention back inward, look at our inner gifts and desires, and sincerely "be ourselves," we may find the secret to creativity in the realization of the self.