the breakthrough essay

From Make-Believe to Must Achieve: How Adulting Killed Our Creativity

We are in what I’m calling The Great Adult Creativity Recession. This essay explores how creativity becomes collateral damage entering adulthood - as the celebration of spontaneous creativity (what if?) is replaced by the demands of productivity and performance (what’s the ROI) - and how we get it back. The path for meaningful change starts here.

Laptop and paint suppliesLaptop and paint supplies
This essay is a resounding wake-up call making people everywhere question everything – and finally take action on executing the ideas that matter.

Creativity is our most neglected and systematically abandoned life skill in adulthood, and it shows.

How have we gone to such an extreme of praising creative exploration in childhood, to discouraging, even intentionally suppressing, creativity in adulthood?

In Other Words:

We’ve replaced our joy of creative expression and possibilities (what if?) with the constant demands of productivity and performance (what’s the ROI?) - and our mental health and lack of fulfillment is a direct reflection of it.

The Twist:

The irony is we have put creativity and its limitless potential in a box - as this fluffy, cute concept, reserving its use exclusively for “creative people” or “creative jobs”- when in actuality everyone, in every industry, in every role, has the potential to be creative. Creativity is literally our strongest vehicle for impact when we use it to generate (and execute) transformational ideas.

Hint:

Consider this essay a creativity intervention: a strategic breakdown of exactly when we lost our creative drive, why our current life systems are to blame, and how to reactivate it.
Warning: what you’re about to read will be the spark for reimagining how we work, live and connect.
Originally published February 2025
By: DeAnna J. McIntosh
woman putting up fabric swatcheswoman putting up fabric swatches
let's unpack what's really going on.

We are in what I’m calling The Great Adult Creativity Recession.

We are lacking that spark we once had.  We don’t daydream about the future anymore, because we’re so bogged down into the many moving pieces of our every day.  Some of us are constantly in survival mode, just trying to stay sane as we navigate the relentless obstacles of adulting.  We don’t “play” anymore, and most of us have lost sight of our own concept of what “fun” is or even “what makes me happy?”.
We keep finding ourselves in this wake up, eat, work, grab dinner, sleep - rinse and repeat cycle, drifting along with what society has painted a picture of what being an adult is all about.
man frustrated at desk

We keep staying at jobs we hate, that suck every ounce of life out of us, just because society tells us that having a job, bringing in consistent ”stable” income is the responsible thing to do, no matter how unfulfilling it is.

person starting a shopify store

Some of us keep opening businesses that turn into financial prisons (and dare I say - the jobs we ran from in the first place), because we opened them with the most popular business structure at the time, or what the “gurus” said will help us make 7 figures in 90 days - no matter how misaligned it is with the vision we once had for our lives.

Somehow, exercising creativity and the freedom of self-expression it brings, has become a luxury.

Something that we engage in whenever we can scrap together the time, or once a year at a vision board party.  Something we get a little taste of when we’re helping our kids with school projects or decorating our homes for the holidays.  Every now and then we get reminders of the things we used to love doing as a child, but then our brains snap back to reality and we tell ourselves that those things are no longer valid because they aren’t productive.
Because who are we really if we aren’t producing or doing things that guarantee an ROI?
But I believe with everything in me that deep down we KNOW how important creativity is.  So much so that we’ve now started using Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an attempted substitute for it.
We continue moving through life, while that once quiet voice continuously gets louder and louder, now shouting in agreement with us that “something is missing” and “there has to be more to life than this”.
Well, there definitely is, and we need to reclaim our creativity to arrive there.

Creativity is truly the missing element to life's fulfillment.

It gives us the power to reimagine and change any situation and mold our lives into what we envision it to be.

It teaches us how to find problems, solve them in unique ways, and positively contribute our talents to society.

Creativity manifests itself differently in each one of us, but is just as immensely valuable in its different forms.
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Whether you're a divergent or convergent thinker, whether you excel in ballet or geometry, creativity is the skill that can propel you forward in your field and your life.
So why isn't creativity valued, taught, and celebrated in every stage of our lives?

This essay seeks to answer that question, offer ways to reverse it, and provide the roadmap to resurrect the most powerful part of you - your ideas.

part 1 (of 5): what creativity is (and isn't)

Reality Check 1 - We will continue to undervalue the power of creativity until we understand what creativity is (and isn’t).

Creativity Definition

Before becoming an Entrepreneur, I thought that a creative person was someone who participated in the arts, and that term creativity was typically associated with any activity incorporating the Arts.  After becoming an Entrepreneur, I noticed the term "creative" referred to small business owners, most often solopreneurs, in the design, fashion, and marketing industries.

Inside my graduate program in creativity and innovation at Drexel University, I discovered the true meaning of creativity, as each of my professors had us create our own definition of what creativity is by the end of their class, based upon what we’d learned.  If you google the definition of creativity right now, you will find many variations, theories, and theorists.  My creativity definition below is the combination of my formal creativity studies and lived creative experiences.

Fun fact: While creative processes had been informally studied earlier, psychologist J.P. Guilford's 1950 American Psychological Association (APA) presidential address marked a turning point in formally establishing creativity as a serious field of scientific research. Despite significant advances, there remains much to explore and learn about the complex nature of creative thinking, which I plan to contribute to through my work!

Chefs cooking in the kitchen

My Formal, Academia Creativity Definition

A Cognitive Process

Creativity is a cognitive process someone uses to produce something original, authentic, and useful, either to find or to solve a problem, or to experience the concept of Flow.  Creativity is the catalyst and primary ingredient for innovation, and it involves both divergent and convergent thinking processes.  Creativity is not limited to a particular domain (a field or industry) and can be applied by anyone, to anything.

Different Forms

Creativity is expressed in different forms, with the most well-known, named "creative geniuses" displaying what is called Big-C creativity, and everyday creativity like creating a meal being called little-c creativity.  The assessment of the level of novelty or originality of something creative is subjective to individual opinion.

As An Adjective

The word creative is used as an adjective to describe the creativity level of a particular thing.   A creative person is someone who possesses, and utilizes, a large number of personality traits and skills that are involved in the creative process.  In addition to problem-solving, creativity can be problem-finding.  Creativity can be driven by intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, and the motivation itself is task-specific.

My Back-Down-to-Earth-from-Academia Definition of Creativity, in bulleted form

  • Creativity is a thought process - so it can be taught and learned by anyone
  • Creativity is used to create something original, authentic and useful

    But what determines something as these three things is subject to individual opinion, which can honestly get, well, complex
  • The purpose of creativity is to solve a problem, find a problem, or to experience Flow

    ‍Flow is a state of mind where you’re completely immersed in what you’re doing, time seems to stand still, and nothing else matters in that moment
  • Creativity is the first step in the innovation process
    ‍
    ‍Creativity is ideation - the generating and honing of ideas.  Innovation is the actual execution of said ideas
woman making candleswoman making candles
  • Creativity is not limited to a certain type of person or profession (like an Artist, Chef or Designer) nor a certain industry (like Film or Crafts)
    ‍
    ‍For example, the accountant who came up with accrual versus cash basis accounting was creative for coming up with a new and useful way to do something existing
  • Creativity comes in many different forms, from grandiose works like a Bach composition, to more organic acts of creativity like mixing new ingredients together to create a new cocktail concoction
  • Creativity can be motivated by internal factors (just for the simple enjoyment of it) or external factors (like money, fame)
  • Bonus: Creativity is also defined and implemented differently in each culture based on their values and lifestyle
    ‍
    For example, the Italian approach to creativity is more free flowing and philosophical, focusing on searching for the true meaning of creativity based on existing frameworks and experiments, while the German approach to creativity is more structured and looks at creativity holistically, in every area of a person's life
Man smiling while touching a flowerMan smiling while touching a flower

“We should think more about creativity as potentially occurring throughout the value chain or network, not just at the beginning with a single originating creative idea.”

Another great explanation of creativity in action is this quote by authors Bilton, Cummings and Olgilvie from their Technology Innovation Management Review article.
Hopefully I’ve painted a clearer picture of what creativity is, and I’ve provided the proof that we all possess the ability to be creative - it’s up to us to nurture it.

I want to also quickly debunk what creativity isn't.

3 Prominent Myths About Creativity

beautiful depiction of brain waves
Myth 1: Only “right-brained” people are creative
The Facts: It’s been scientifically proven that there is no hemisphere or single brain region that plays a leading role in creativity.  Again, proving the fact that everyone can be creative - we just need to understand our unique creative abilities
artist dipping paint in color palette
Myth 2: Being “creative” is absolute.  You have it or you don’t
The Facts: Creativity is a thinking process that can be taught and learned. Creative personality traits can be developed. We are all born with creative potential, but it’s only as valuable as the time we spend nurturing it
man playing the violin
 Myth 3: Creativity is talent exclusively reserved for the arts
The Facts: Creativity can be utilized by any person, in any profession or industry, because again, it is a thinking process centered around producing something original, authentic and useful (not some magical spirit that only musicians, artists, etc. possess)
let's recap:

We now have a clear definition of what creativity is (and isn’t) and the acceptance that we are all actually born with it.

Now, we will explore how creativity typically manifests itself throughout our lifespan - which has ultimately led us to this (Not so) Great Adult Creativity Recession.
up next: part 2 (of 5)

The 4 Life Stages of Creativity

Continue on to Part 2

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    DeAnna McIntosh
    Idea-to-Execution Strategist

    On this site, we explore:

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    What creativity is (and isn’t), how it evolves throughout our lifetime, and why it’s critical to our success to activate it
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    Using Intrapreneurship as an employee engagement + retention tool and innovation engine inside your organization

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    We're In What I'm Calling The Great Adult Creativity Recession
    Read the breakthrough essay making people everywhere question everything – and finally take action on executing their ideas that matter.
    Visioning Shouldn't Be Confined To Annual Vision Board Parties
    Instead of making vision boards (too big picture and unactionable) or 5-year plans (too rigid and inflexible), we should make purpose prototypes.
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