Page 73 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

64 CREATIVITY VERSUS TALENT

to think of a straight line. Anyone can have the idea of a straight line,
whether or not they can draw it.
This misconception is so pervasive in our society. I see it all the
time. Creative Needlework is the name of a book of patterns from which
you copy an idea that someone else had. Well, the person who initially
had the idea was creative, but everyone else who has ever copied that
pattern definitely was not performing anything creative in doing so.
Even in a creative cooking class, if the master chef tells you exactly
how to do it, you have to create nothing.

7
THE CREATIVE DEPARTMENT?

I ran an ad agency creative department for many years at a company
that went by many names, starting with Leonard/Monahan. All ad
agencies have creative departments. I must say with a lack of humility
usually reserved for parents that this creative department was one of
the best in the world from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, and I challenge
anyone to argue that point. Schenck, Lubars, Baldwin and Goodrich,
just to name the creative directors.
In addition to having some extremely creative people in the cre-
ative department, extremely talented people worked for me, too. All
the people were a blend of both creativity and talent. But as creative as
this department was, I would say that most of the people who worked
for me were stronger on the talent side of the equation than the cre-
ative side. Nice writing. Well-crafted art. But where did the idea for
the ad come from? My company probably exhibited the 80/20 rule as
well as any ad agency in the business—that is, 80 percent of the big
ideas come from 20 percent of the people. (See Chapter 18, Mind
Farming, for a detailed discussion of creative personality typing.)
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I hear about creative artists, and I go to galleries, and so much of it
has already been done. It’s so derivative. Most fine art, particularly in
the early periods—landscapes, still lifes, portraiture—is not a display
of creativity. It is simply a display of talent. If it looked like what the
artist was painting, they created nothing. They re-created it at best.
There’s a fun little exercise I use quite often in my classroom to clar-
ify the distinction between creativity and talent. I play a piece of music