Creativity As A Top Strength

If Creativity is your top strength, thinking of new ways to do things is a crucial part of who you are. You are never content with doing something the conventional way if a better way is possible.

Virtue Category:
Creativity falls in the virtue category of Wisdom. Wisdom deals with strengths that involve the way we acquire and use knowledge.

Key Concepts:
There are two essential components to Creativity- originality and adaptiveness. A creative individual generates ideas or behaviors that are novel or unusual and these make a positive contribution to the individual’s life or the lives of others.

Exercises For Boosting Creativity:
When facing a problem, define the issue clearly and then practice divergent thinking (ex: developing multiple solutions/outcomes rather than just one solution).
Set time aside each day for creative thinking or creative activities (such as: writing poems or using an everyday household object in a new way)

Janet Echelman: Taking imagination seriously

The TED Talk by American artist Janet Echelman (viewed by 1.5million people) – she reshapes urban airspace with monumental, fluidly moving sculpture that responds to environmental forces including wind, water, and sunlight.

Why you should listen
Janet Echelman builds living, breathing sculpture environments that respond to the forces of nature — wind, water and light— and become inviting focal points for civic life.

Exploring the potential of unlikely materials, from fishing net to atomized water particles, Echelman combines ancient craft with cutting-edge technology to create her permanent sculpture at the scale of buildings. Experiential in nature, the result is sculpture that shifts from being an object you look at, to something you can get lost in.

Recent prominent works include “Her Secret is Patience”, which spans two city blocks in downtown Phoenix, “Water Sky Garden”, which premiered for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, and “She Changes”, which transformed a waterfront plaza in Porto, Portugal. Her newest commission creates a “Zone of Recomposure” in the new Terminal 2 at San Francisco International Airport. Upcoming projects include the remaking of Dilworth Plaza in front of Philadelphia City Hall — turning it into a garden of dry-mist.