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Today we are going to be talking about the 4C Model of Creativity, which deals with what we call Creative Magnitude. 

Image source: http://www.normanjackson.co.uk/creativejam.html

What I want you to take away from this episode is that you shouldn’t think about creativity as simply just the big ideas that have this massive impact on society. It’s a really limiting way of thinking about creativity. 

There is a wide variety of creative ideas, all the way from the really tiny to the huge. Being able to see the everyday creativity that you’re already using is really empowering because it helps you to really take control of your immediate surroundings and be able to apply your creativity to your everyday life rather than just simply waiting for whatever big idea you would like to come to you. 

So I think one of the biggest takeaways for myself is that when you break down creativity into these different categories you can really see how you are using the same creativity tools in your everyday life and so it gives you this feeling of being able to really take better control over your personal life. You can say “okay I don’t have to simply try to create some giant idea… I can use my creativity to benefit myself today or to benefit the people around me today.” I think that’s a really cool takeaway. 

So before we jump in and start breaking everything down let me just say that’s all types of creativity, whether time out the really small “Mini-C” creativity or the really big “Big-C” creativity… all that is still going to satisfy our 2 main criteria for what a creative idea needs to be: It needs to be unique and it needs to be useful. And, of course, when we talk about being unique and useful we really mean unique to a relative group and useful to a relevant group. As we break down creativity more in this episode you’ll see why that phrase “to a relevant group” is so important. 

If you’re having trouble visualizing any of these ideas you can go to JaredVolle.com, go to my blog, and then for this episode, I will leave some images that can help you visualize what’s going on. 

So here are the 4 C’s of creativity. The first that we’re gonna be talking about we have Mini-C, which is the smallest level. We have a small C, which is the number 2… we have pro-C, and pro stands for “professional”… so it’s a professional level of creativity. Last, we have the biggest. We have big C creativity. 

So let me give you a quick example of how this might look in an industry… how we would break it down. 

Think about a stand-up comedian. There is the Mini-C creativity, where they are just learning about creativity in their head maybe they’re writing jokes but they haven’t really done anything where the audience can see that they’ve been creative at this point. We really just have to trust that person that they are doing something creative. It is happening entirely within themselves. 

Once we move up to small C creativity, this would be like the open mic level of stand-up comedy, where the comedians have clearly written something, like a unique joke, perhaps it gets a laugh perhaps it doesn’t. So they are having some amount of social impact, but it’s really difficult to say how much impact there is. 

From there we scale up to Pro-C creativity. Again Pro-C equals professional, so this is where you would see a professional level of creativity inside the industry. These are the comedians that are on tour the comedians that perhaps they can sell out arenas or maybe they are making a living somehow in the industry. So their level of creativity is clearly better than what is happening at the small-C level, at the open mic level, but they’re not quite at the Big-C level of creativity yet. 

The big-C level is where you have this industry-altering idea. You could think about comedians like Richard Pryor and George Carlin, people that radically altered the stand-up comedy industry. This we would say is a Big-C creative idea. They had a massive massive impact on the industry. 

So let’s start over on the far left with Mini-C creativity. Mini-C is the lowest level of creativity from a societal standpoint. So what we’re talking about here is being personally creative. This is when you learn anything new. We can call that personal creativity. Think about what learning something actually means. When you learn something new, you are making new connections in your mind. So it is still unique because it’s unique to you, and ideally what you learn is going to be useful to you in the future… so it’s unique and useful, which makes it creative. Because you are the only group that really matters here, we can say that it is creative to you… it is personally creative. 

We are going to return to this idea of Mini-C creativity later on because it’s really important. For now, I’m gonna keep going and we’re going to move on to small-C creativity. 

Think about small C creativity as being like everyday creativity. A good example is anytime you are engaged that in daily problem solving, the normal problems that come up throughout your day. Those are situations that are unique and you need to find an effective solution, so you are engaged in creativity whenever you do that everyday problem-solving. 

A really good example is navigating a really difficult conversation. If you think about what that entails, you have to use the same tools that you create in your professional life to navigate difficult conversations. 

So let’s move up to the Pro-C level of creativity. As I said, this is where you’re displaying a professional level of creativity. So you are good enough in your industry to make an impact, perhaps not a historical impact. You might not completely alter where your industry was going, but at the same time you are clearly good enough to be a professional inside of your industry. 

You could put any professional artist here. You could put consultants because people that are consultants have built this map in their head about what needs to be done and how to get it done. So consultants have this pro-level of creativity that allows them to go into businesses or to coach people and teach them how to get those results as well. 

Finally, we have what’s called a big C creativity. As we’ve been saying, this is the highest form of creativity. This level is reserved for people like Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. Think about the creation of the first Google algorithm… things like that. These are things that radically altered where the industry was going. 

Okay, let’s recap really quickly. Mini-C creativity happens inside yourself. It is purely subjective because other people you’re not actually creating an external product that people can see. These are things like learning or changing how you’re viewing the situation, like your perspective or your interpretation of something. 

Moving up we have small C creativity… this is where you are creative in an everyday context. So here you’re actually creating something external that people can see and can judge. Maybe they know you’re being creative or maybe they don’t. It doesn’t really change anything. What’s important here is that you are taking some kind of unique action that does have an effect on the world, however that effect is really small. It might be something like your immediate family or people around you. 

With the pro-C level of creativity, your social impact is increasing. You’re now creating ideas that people in your industry can view and recognize as being useful and worth including in the industry. So think about this as like the comedian whose jokes are good enough now to where the gatekeepers of the industry are willing to let that comedian in and maybe they can go to some high profile venues and perform there. 

Then we have big C creativity where you have the maximum impact of your idea, like your idea just completely changes where the industry is going. 

Okay so let’s recycle back to this idea of Mini-C creativity and why it is so important. 

Mini-C creativity really underpins all the other types of creativity. So what am I talking about with small-C and pro-C or big-C… underneath every one of those ideas, regardless of how big it is, there’s Mini-C creativity. 

So think about it from this perspective. When you finally have this breakthrough of how to solve some kind of problem in your life, let’s just say is that it’s a small problem that could be an everyday problem. It might be a problem you’ve struggled with for a week or 2, but whatever the case when you have that breakthrough, that Eureka moment, that aha-moment… that is coming from Mini-C creativity.

Mini-C doesn’t really care where the idea ends up. You can think about Mini-C creativity as the source of all other types of creativity, everything begins with you… it begins with this your Eureka moment, or aha moment, where you say “I think this could work.” 

So to give you an example from my own personal life when I had the inspiration to write my book Playfully Inappropriate. I was walking my dog and I had this weird idea. I said “what if I could write a stand-up comedy training book without ever using the term setup or punchline?” That was a bizarre idea, but if I trace back Playfully Inappropriate all the way back to what I could to consider the very beginning, I would have to say it was me walking my dog having that really weird thought. 

And of course, that’s not where the book ended up, that’s just how it got started. So that is that Mini-C creativity, that aha moment, which I would even say didn’t even have much value except to get me pushing in a different direction. If I just simply wrote a book and didn’t use the word setup or punchline, that we would be unique but it wouldn’t matter. The reason why it matters because it pushed me in a way that forced me to do something different and then it was only from using more Mini-C creativity that I could take that weird idea and I started problem-solving and saying “okay if I go in this new direction with storytelling. What is the way I can provide value to the people that are reading?” 

So that was a way of taking a unique idea and then adding some usefulness to it. So my point here is just to say that all of the ideas you have are going to begin with that Mini-C idea. It begins with that first time. An idea really connects in your head and you recognize it as being something that is possibly worth pursuing. It is only from there that you can really start engaging in problem-solving and really elaborating on whatever idea you had… but it always starts with some kind of new interpretation in your own head so you are the source of the creativity. 

Before you finish up I’m gonna give you my own personal interpretation of how I like to apply this you can take it with a grain of salt. I can’t recall any creativity research off the top of my head that says I’m right or wrong, so this is just how I feel about it. 

Think about the difference between a big C and small C levels of creativity. 

In general, when you look at the big earth-shaking creative ideas that we all do want to have those as creative people… it’s not the only goal, but I think if you don’t want that you probably crazy… we all want to have some kind of social impact using our creativity. 

When you look at those ideas that are really game-changing, those big C creative ideas tend to be holistically creative. They’re not simply just this linear progression of ideas. Think about a comedian that just tells a joke that is 1 percent 2 percent funnier than the other comedians. That’s worthy of being you know as pro-C level creativity, but at the same time there is no amount of just trying to boost the quality of a joke, no amount of editing or revising your stuff to make it funnier or more effective is ever going to result in you having this big C level of creativity. 

I keep using stand-up comedy but you can translate this into whichever industry you’re working in. Think about a comedian like Richard Pryor. Richard Pryor broke this idea that as a comedian we all had to be light-hearted and fun. He was the comedian that really just said “let me invite you into the darkness of my life.” And the audience was like “man this is more authentic and real than any comedian has been ever.” 

It is a huge mistake to think that you can just simply make funnier jokes in order to get to that level because that is not what made him so successful. No amount of editing jokes would ever result in a Richard Pryor or George Carlin or a Steve Martin. This is what I mean when I’m talking about being holistically creative. You are breaking the paradigm of the industry. 

This has huge implications for how we should act as creative people if big C creative idea is what you’re after. And again, it is not the only goal worth pursuing, but if that is your goal then you really need to understand that no amount of editing or revising or doing the same things but trying to do them better than other people… no amount of competition is gonna get you there. 

If you look at a lot of the artists that really changed the industry, you will see that it was not them being competitive… it wasn’t them trying to outdo you other people. It was them doing something radically different and being willing to double down on their uniqueness. It was their uniqueness that made them so important and then later on they were able to combine that uniqueness with being really effective. 

We talked about Steve Martin’s career in an earlier episode he began with this really unique idea and it took him 10 years to figure out how to be really effective at using the idea of anti-comedy. 

Whenever you look at big C creative people, you tend to see that pattern. You see them focusing a lot on their uniqueness early on and then spending that intermediate time between the unique idea and becoming famous… you see them using that time to figure out how to be effective inside of their unique idea. 

I think that is where we need to be regardless of what industry you’re in. It should be an important goal starting with the uniqueness and figuring out how to be effective inside of the unique idea… that is way way easier than trying the opposite route. 

So think about as a comedian, I write this perfect joke and I edit it so that is there is the perfect amount of words the punchline is really snappy and quick and it gets a good laugh… so I keep writing and rewriting the joke until it gets this laughter I want. 

Now assume that I am getting laughs but now I want to be more unique. How on earth do you take that idea that you honed down into this perfect perfect joke or this perfect creative idea… how do you take that and then try to add uniqueness to it? 

When you revised your creative idea, you hone it down so that everything is in this perfect balance. You cannot upset that balance by then adding uniqueness to it. Any uniqueness you would add it’s going to be entirely superficial. 

So that’s why I think it is so important as creative people that we focus first on our uniqueness and then we cycle back in as were being unique. We focus on combining that uniqueness with effectiveness. That is a much better strategy than trying it the other way around.