What Einstein and Picasso Had In Common

 

Pablo Picasso is one of modern art’s most prodigious artists. He lived a long, productive life and seemed to exercise his artistic genius at his whim. According to Howard Gardner in Creating Minds (Basic Books), Picasso did run into trouble when it came to conventional learning. He despised school and would do almost anything to get out of going.

Learning to read, write and work with numbers perplexed and frustrated the young Picasso. He related to numbers purely visually. For instance, when he saw a pigeon, he saw the eyes as 0s and its wings as 2s, says Gardner, but the idea of numerals as symbols for quantities completely eluded him. He was such a bad student that without extensive private tutoring and a good deal of obvious cheating, it’s believed he never would have made it through grade school.

Picasso, ironically, was one of the most celebrated abstract artists of all time and was never able to master abstract thinking or traditional scholastic material. However, his parents continued to encourage him as an artist and the rest, as they say, is history.

Grow Down

By the time most of us are adults, we’ve unfortunately learned to suppress our natural joy and creative spirit. Getting back to that innate capacity is the key to tapping your innovative output, according to creativity and breakthrough ideas expert Joey Reiman (www.thinkbrighthouse.com).

Think about it. If you ask children to dance or draw a picture, they’ll most likely do it, but ask the same of people over 40 and you’ll no doubt get a look and maybe a choice comment. If you want to improve your creativity, you have to reconnect to that part of yourself you’ve shut down merely because you’ve become a grown-up.

“Grow down,” Reiman advises.

Advertising genius Alex Osborn integrated creativity with everything he did every day. Considered the “father of brainstorming,” a term he helped coin in 1939, Osborn devoted his life to promoting and teaching creative thinking. The fiercest enemy of creativity, he believed, was criticism: “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud. Any of us will put out more and better ideas if our efforts are appreciated.”