People keep asking me what the creative life even is, and the closest I land is a line of Steve Jobs’s: creativity is just connecting things. You take the inputs of your life and synthesize something that, after the fact, feels obvious. It isn’t invention from nothing. It’s perspective.
The thing I can’t stop noticing is how much space matters. Five of us type our notes from the same lecture and the pages come out nearly identical. Write them by hand and my individuality is all over mine, the weird diagrams because I think visually, yours highlighted and ordered your way. The pen leaves room for the self. Most of the tools we’re handed quietly take that room away.
So when someone tells me they aren’t creative, I don’t think they’re missing a gift. I think they’ve been trained to consume and given no space to connect. Creativity is mostly the confidence to explore, and somewhere open enough to do it.
What would you connect if something actually gave you the space to?