Creativity is a paradox

Creativity appears self-contradictory. For everything that's true about creativity, the opposite is also true (and all truths in between).

Practicing creativity involves seemingly opposite modes and approaches:

• Be slow, strategic, and careful / be fast, fluid and spontaneous
• Sketch out the rough outline / dig into the fine details
• Generate a bunch of ideas / identify the best ideas
• How does it work? / How does it feel?
• Let's get organized / Let's make a mess

Seen through a binary lens, these modes might be roughly sorted into Classic mode and Romantic mode. This view is useful for practicing creativity to identify skill areas to practice. It is also illusory—in reality the "opposites" are integrated and fluid, a spectrum of seemingly contradictory truths existing all at once within the creative cycle (Creativity is cyclical) and within multiple layers of experience.

People flow through the creative spectrum with tendencies toward familiar states, so practicing creativity is an exercise in becoming more fluent in the full range of creative states and integrating them in the full creative cycle by intuiting when to shift perspective (Integrate classic mode and romantic mode).

This paradoxical nature reflects the generative power of creativity. Because creativity happens on the boundary of existence and non-existence, self and not-self, it operates in a "both/and" context in which multiple possibilities, patterns, and realities can co-exist that appear to negate each other. (Creativity is a superpower)