Let me be straight with you: I spent years telling myself I wasn't creative. I was a history guy. A football coach. A numbers-and-strategy person. Creativity was for painters and musicians — not for guys like me.

That belief cost me. It kept me from writing, from building, from seeing problems the way they actually needed to be seen. It took a long time to realize I wasn't uncreative. I was just untrained. Worse, I'd accepted a lie that let me off the hook from doing hard, generative work.

The truth? Creativity is not a personality type. It is not a talent distributed at birth to a lucky few. It is a capacity — one that expands the more you use it and shrinks the more you ignore it. And in a world that increasingly rewards people who can think differently, solve problems, and make something from nothing, the people who treat creativity as someone else's gift are quietly falling behind.

The Lie We Believe About Creative People

We've been told the story wrong. We think creativity is spontaneous — lightning-bolt moments that strike artists in the middle of the night. We think it's innate: either you have it or you don't. We see the finished product and assume it emerged fully formed from some rare, gifted mind.

None of that is true. What we call "creativity" is almost always the visible result of an invisible process — one built from curiosity, repetition, failure, and disciplined attention. The artist who seems to work effortlessly has usually failed a thousand times in private. The entrepreneur who had the "great idea" out of nowhere spent years building a mental library of patterns and connections.

Why It Actually Matters Right Now

We are living through a moment where the most routine, predictable work is being automated at speed. What remains — what will always remain — is the work that requires genuine human judgment: connecting dots that haven't been connected before, making things that didn't exist, imagining solutions no one's tried yet.

That's not the future. That's now. And the people who invested early in developing their creative capacity are the ones positioned to thrive in it.

But here's the deeper argument, beyond career strategy:

There is something deeply alive in the act of creating. Whether it's building a lesson plan, designing a play on the whiteboard, writing a letter to your kid, or sketching an idea on a napkin — the act of making something connects you to the part of you that is most fully human. When you stop creating, something quiets inside you. You may not notice it at first. But it's there.

The Three Dimensions of Creative Capacity

Creativity isn't one thing. Think of it as three overlapping capacities, each of which can be trained:

You can practice all three deliberately. They are learnable. The question is whether you build the habit of doing so.

Six Ways to Actually Train It

These aren't abstract suggestions. Each one is a real practice — something you can do this week, not someday.

The Hero Who Created

I think about a man in the Book of Mormon who didn't wait for conditions to be perfect. Nephi didn't have tools, blueprints, or a shipbuilding background. He had a vision, a willingness to figure it out, and the stubbornness to keep going when his brothers told him he'd fail. He built a ship.

That is creative work. Not because it was artistic — but because it required him to imagine something that didn't exist, solve problems no one had solved in that context, and persist through failure until the thing was real.

The heroes we honor weren't just brave. They were creative. They saw differently, acted differently, and made something from what they had.

Start Here

You don't need a new tool, a new class, or a new season of life to start building your creative capacity. You need to start making things. Badly, at first. Regularly, always.

The muscle grows when you use it. The only training plan that doesn't work is the one you haven't started.

Wear the hero. Become the hero.