Less than half of people would describe themselves as creative

Often when I am giving workshops or keynotes around creativity, especially in a corporate setting, I will ask the participants to anonymously vote on whether they are creative or not.

You would be surprised how many people believe that they are not creative.

And a series of surveys by Adobe in 2012 and 2016 show just how few people consider themselves to be creative.

For their “State of Create” research, Adobe commissioned 5,000 people to be surveyed, in the USA, UK, Germany, Japan and France.

Since Adobe is a company that sells creative service software, like Photoshop and After Effects, there were a lot of questions about how these individuals felt about the state of the creative industries, and whether creativity was adding value to the economy and society.

But two questions stood out to me:

What words would you use to describe yourself? (multiple answers possible, one of which was “creative”)
Are you living up to your creative potential?

Here are the answers which these 5,000 people gave:

As you can see, less than half of people on average (39% in 2012 and 41% in 2016) would describe themselves as creative.

And only about a quarter of people feel like they are fulfilling their creative potential.

It is also important to realise that out of all the countries, the participants from the USA had scores which were far higher, and therefore brought up the average. So the average scores for the rest of the world were even lower.

While the numbers seem to be rising very slowly, this still shows that the majority of people around the world do not believe in their own creativity.

Now, it might be true that creativity scores are falling across the world.

But everyone is creative.

And everyone has the potential to improve their creativity.

If you feel like you are not living up to your creative potential, then check out these simple things you can do right now in order to improve your creativity capabilities.

Bio
Latest Posts

Nick Skillicorn

Chief Editor, Founder & CEO at Improvides Innovation Consulting

Creativity & Innovation expert: I help individuals and companies build their creativity and innovation capabilities, so you can develop the next breakthrough idea which customers love. Chief Editor of Ideatovalue.com and Founder / CEO of Improvides Innovation Consulting. Coach / Speaker / Author / TEDx Speaker / Voted as one of the most influential innovation bloggers.