Creative is not a single label you just stamp onto someone as he/she was chosen at random to be kissed on the forehead by the muses. Creativity is a whole series of character traits that overlap and feed each other – it’s an outlook allowing you different combinatory skills, different ways of learning and seeing in the world things that still aren’t. It is also not all sunshine, roses and artistic flow, but comes with its own shortcomings and blessings. We’re all a custom made recipe, a mixture of 5 deeply rooted traits in various amounts that make the cornerstones of our personality and psychological reactions to the environment: extroversion, neuroticism, openness to ideas, agreeableness and conscientiousness. This traits will determine every aspect of your life, from your voting patterns, your partner or sexual preferences to the topics you’re interested in..

While extroverts and introverts carry equally many highly creative individuals and neuroticism is more prominent in women while agreeableness being less present in men and their competition oriented stance, the two most determining factors of pure core creativity are openness and conscientiousness. Creative people are almost as a rule high in trade openness meaning they operate more in the realm of ideas and aesthetics, often making them slightly more intelligent due to the constant practice of manipulating abstractions. Conscientiousness on the other hand is a restricting factor. Sure you need to fulfill your tasks, but too much rigidity and obsessive adherence to the rules and systems is detrimental to creativity. Creative people usually don’t fit well within the existing system so they either stand outside or make their own. The sole existence of a structure means something has already been done so it holds no interest to the creative person craving far less security than the conscientious person. But there is an unusual new thing going on. As a lot of the non creative jobs can easily be outsourced to a machine or an algorithm larger structures need more creative people. But there is a problem, The creatives don’t do that well at the bottom of the hierarchy and entry level positions because there is no room for them to do what they do best – think the new idea and reality into being. So they largely fail to make it in a regular corporate environment, but do very well if given freedom to change things. While the highly conscientious people are somewhat rigid and enjoy the safety of the rules, they do much better as managers of large corporations and some vocations that need rules to exist such as law or accounting, where as the creative type would become so bored by repetition that he would soon move on to the next thing. So can you become more creative – you can develop it a bit, just as a creative person can learn to adhere to some rules, but your core self is far less lightly to completely change teams.

For something to work in the long run you need both types. So “Know thyself” is magnificent advice. Once you know where you fall on the curves and go to find a partner to do something with, resist the temptation to choose someone likeminded and choose your opposite instead. This is life, complementary faults in each annihilating each other. There is power in diversity not homogenization. Boxes are for things and not people.