Creativity, Innate vs. Learnable

“Personally, I don’t really think of creativity as a noun. This romantic post-enlightenment notion of an essence being endowed to people that’s responsible for their ability to produce novel things is weird to me. 

…I would grant that there’s probably an innate portion and a learnable portion. But like anything, the degree of variance of that innate portion is probably nothing compared to the potential that one has to exercise, practice, and learn. There’s probably an order of magnitude difference. Obviously there are going to be outliers, people who have an extraordinary amount of innate sense. But for most of the population, that difference can be swallowed up by just study and practice.”

Ze Frank, excerpted from an 02/01/06 interview at tompeters.com