Character strength · Wisdom
Creativity as a character strength: meaning and examples
The short answer: creativity is the habit of finding new and useful ways to do things. It covers art, music and writing, but just as much a clever fix at work or an inventive way to spend a rainy Sunday. It is one of the 24 character strengths of the VIA classification, in the Wisdom family: the strengths of the mind.
What creativity looks like
People with a lot of creativity tend to:
- see more than one way to solve a problem, and enjoy finding the unusual one
- rearrange, rewrite or redesign things that already work, just to make them better
- get ideas in the shower, on a walk, or just before falling asleep
- dislike filling in templates exactly as given
- combine things that do not usually go together: recipes, styles, ideas
In everyday life
At work, creativity is the person who finds the shortcut nobody saw, writes the email that actually gets a reply, or turns a dull presentation into something people remember. At home, it is the improvised dinner, the handmade birthday card, the game invented on a long car ride.
Creativity is not the same as artistic talent. Many highly creative people cannot draw at all; their originality shows in how they think, plan and solve.
Creativity and the strengths close to it
- Curiosity takes in what is new. Creativity makes something new out of it.
- Love of learning builds the skills that give creative ideas somewhere to go.
- Humor is creativity applied to a joke: seeing the unexpected connection.
When creativity is overdone, or underused
Like every strength, creativity works best in the right amount. Overdone, creativity can mean changing things that did not need changing, chasing novelty over results, or leaving others struggling to follow. Underused, problems get the same old answers, and work can feel like following someone else's script.
The aim is originality that serves a purpose, not novelty for its own sake.
Is creativity one of your top strengths?
Ask yourself:
- When you are given a task, do you instinctively look for a different way to do it?
- Do people ask you for ideas, names or ways around a problem?
- Do you feel frustrated when there is no room to do things your own way?
If you answered yes to most of these, creativity may be one of your signature strengths. The only way to know how it compares with your other 23 is to rank them.
Find your top strengths with the free test
Where this comes from
The 24 character strengths were described by psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman in Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004). Happy Me's assessment uses public-domain questions from the International Personality Item Pool and is not affiliated with the VIA Institute.