Being creative

“You only have to look at your children’s drawings or listen to the odd little phrases they coin to know that man is born with a creative urge. Yet sadly, most people lose this urge as they grow older.

Many ‘primitive’ societies seem far wiser than us in the way they nurture this quality. For example, I have in my home some masks and statues from New Guinea, tapa cloths from Samoa, and aboriginal paintings. Artists like Picasso learned much from this kind of art, and the artistic impulse – seen in acts like body painting and tattooing – seems more widespread in their communities.

But we ‘civilised’ folk in pursuit of such worthy ends as direct marketing allow this inherent ability to atrophy. We have come to think only a special, gifted few can be ‘creative’.”

– Drayton Bird, British direct marketing guru, in ‘The birth of an idea’ from his book Commonsense Direct Marketing