I’ve always found myself to be largely creative and do my best to think outside the box with everything I do. Without creativity the world wouldn’t have even made it to the bronze age. People wouldn’t have even discovered the wheel yet unless they happened upon it by chance. Creativity is the God given gift that has brought us through the ages and the reason a company like ours exists. Engineers find themselves at the forefront of this and have the best job (in my opinion) on the planet: being paid to be creative.
I believe that creativity develops at a young age. Not that I’m an expert on children, but I am sure that during the developing stages in a person’s youth is when creativity is best fostered. They say that creativity is like a muscle as well. According to the Frontiers for Young Minds, the first step in their defined creative process is the mental connection of drawing from previous experience or creations that one has taken part in to help with the immediate task at hand. This could be compared to exercise in a way; the more often one puts himself in situations that require creative and clever solutions that he must come up with on the spot, the more that he must draw from in the future when faced with bigger and more important or substantive challenges.
Creativity is not always an act of the mind in tandem with the body to make art or to come up with some crazy invention, but it is also fleshed out in the realm of problem solving. When one faces an issue that he has never faced before, creativity is what kicks in to come up with a solution that perhaps has never been imagined. This is where the beauty of engineering plays in. It is the perfect marriage of out of the box thinking and problem solving. In this area, the most common situation is for a problem or inefficiency to be brought to attention, and then a product or upgrade is produced that annuls this deficiency. If not for creativity, a very limited number of solutions could be developed, and innovation would be seriously limited to what already exists. Creativity allows for truly infinite solutions to be imagined and put into play, and allows for answers that no one could initially imagine except for the mind of the creator.
