One reason for discounting our creative abilities is comparing ourselves to other people, especially well-known and successful artists. Myths about artists being "crazy" or "starving" may also influence how much we may be motivated to live a creative life.

1. Be More Creative: What
Is Your Self Concept?
by Douglas Eby

2. "Anyone who says 'I don’t have a
creative bone in my body' is
seriously underestimating their
skeleton.
"More to the point, they are
drastically undervaluing their brain."
From article: 10 Reasons Why We Struggle With Creativity
by David DiSalvo [Forbes.com]

3. One reason for
discounting our
creative abilities is
comparing ourselves
to well-known and
successful artists.
One example: Dean Koontz has written multiple
novels on the New York Times Best-Seller List,
and is reportedly a millionaire.

4. Lady Gaga has sold
over 23 million albums
and 64 million singles
worldwide, and been
awarded at least five
Grammy Awards.
By the way, as a teenager, she was identified as gifted.

5. Movies can be a major source
of images and ideas of what
creative people are like.
He was an image of high passion, high drama, plenty of sturm
and drang - yet many creative people are inner-directed and
highly sensitive, often working quietly alone.
One of the influences on my concept of “artist” was Charlton
Heston as Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, 1965.

6. Many artists create work to
present a fuller and more
authentic representation of
themselves and other people
than what appears in
entertainment media.
Painter and novelist Laura Molina notes, "As an educated, native-
born, English-speaking, fifth generation Mexican-American and a
feminist, there is almost no reflection of me in the movies or
television, which is almost as bad as being stereotyped."

7. Do you compare yourself
with other creative people,
especially the "big names"?
Maybe you say things like:
"I don't have their talent" or
"They've been lucky" or
"I can't paint."
Really? Even an elephant can paint - and have an
"agent" that sells their "artwork."
[The photo is from The Asian Elephant Art & Conservation Project.]

8. "Author Betty Edwards asks, “Why do we assume that
a rare and special ‘artistic’ talent is required for
drawing? We don’t make that assumption about other
kinds of abilities."

9. She adds, “If you can catch a baseball,
thread a needle, or hold a pencil and write
your name, you can learn to draw
skillfully, artistically, and creatively.”
From her book Drawing on the Artist Within

10. Personal growth psychologist
Abraham Maslow
once commented:
“We have got to abandon that
sense of amazement in the face of
creativity, as if it were a miracle if
anybody created anything.”

11. This image is bird pins made of
scrap wood, paint and metal,
from the book:
The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts
from the Japanese American
Internment Camps 1942-1946.

12. Most of the people in the camps were not
professional artists – they were doctors,
dentists, farmers, shop owners, teachers.
Yet they created a variety of furniture, sculpture,
paintings and writings, performed skits and
played music.

13. Gloria Steinem has
pointed out: “Most
art in the world does
not have a capital
‘A,’ but is a way of
turning everyday
objects into personal
expressions.”

14. She also said that
telling ourselves “I
can’t write,” “I can’t
paint” (or whatever) is
really saying, “I can’t
meet some outside
standard. I’m not
acceptable as I am.”
From her book Revolution From Within.

15. Instead of saying. "I'm not a painter" (or
writer, or musician, designer, or
whatever), it can be helpful to think,
"I would like to paint something, just for
the experience, and see if I like doing it."

16. Artists are often depicted
in movies and media in
ways that may promote
myths about what it takes
to be a “real” singer,
writer, actor, painter or
other creator.
One example is the movie “Art School Confidential” –
source of this image.

17. Writer, poet, playwright and
filmmaker Julia Cameron
sometimes asks people to
list ten traits they think
artists have.
She reports they say things like “Artists are broke,”
“Artists are crazy,” “Artists are drug-addicted”
and “Artists are drunk.”

18. An example of this kind of
perception of artists:
actor Natalie Portman once
admitted, “Sometimes I get
scared that I’m not a
creative person, because it
seems creative people are
really flaky…”

19. Cameron added, “When young
people tell their parents, ‘I’d love
to be a writer,’ their parents say,
‘Don’t you think you might need
something to fall back on?’
“We’re also trained to believe that
some people born knowing they’re
artists are the ‘real’ artists...
"We have a mythology about artistry that tends to
be very daunting.”
Julia Cameron is author of “The Artist’s Way.”

20. In her book "The Highly Sensitive
Person," Elaine Aron PhD writes
about some of the often mistaken
ideas about creative people: “It is
part of the myth or archetype of
the artist that any psychological
help will destroy creativity by
making the artist too normal.”
Musician Sting used to be known as ‘The King of Pain’

21. Sting said in a documentary, “Do
I have to be in pain to write? I
thought so - that you had to be
the struggling artist, the tortured,
painful, poetic wreck.
"But I’d like to do my work, and
be a happy man. I’ve got enough
memories of pain, of
dysfunctional living to last me the
rest of my life, so I don’t really
need to manufacture that kind of
life to be creative."

22. Actor Emma Watson, for example,
said: “It’s almost like the better I do,
the more my feeling of inadequacy
actually increases, because I’m just
going, Any moment, someone’s
going to find out I’m a total fraud,
and that I don’t deserve any of what
I’ve achieved."
Another aspect of self concept: Many talented and creative
people experience impostor feelings and beliefs about
themselves, despite their accomplishments.

23. Meryl Streep has said, “I have
varying degrees of confidence
and self-loathing….
“You can have a perfectly
horrible day where you doubt
your talent… Or that you’re
boring and they’re going to find
out that you don’t know what
you’re doing.”

24. Jonathan Safran Foer
commented about his New York
Times best-selling novel
"Everything Is Illuminated" :
“I can be very hard on myself. I
convince myself that I’m fooling
people. Or, I convince myself
that people like the book for the
wrong reasons.”

25. Actor Jessica Chastain (“Zero
Dark Thirty”) “spent much of her
life feeling like a fraud…at the
Juilliard School she was terrified
she’d be exposed as a talentless
hack and sent home.” [GQ Magazine]
“It’s really why I never partied
with the other students,” she says.

26. “Photography, painting or poetry –
those are just extensions of me,
how I perceive things, they are my
way of communicating.”
Actor Viggo Mortensen
from post: Multitalented creative people
"Creative expression derives directly from the unique Self of the
creator…the whole process is accompanied by a feeling of aliveness."
Educator Annemarie Roeper - Quoted in book The Gifted Adult

27. For more on this broad topic of creativity and identity :
Artists are Crazy; Mothers Can’t Be Artists, and Other Myths
You want to be an artist? Are you crazy?
Creative People and Mental Health: Interview with Psychologist Cheryl Arutt
Getting beyond impostor feelings
~ ~ ~
Also see longer PDF version of this presentation,
with more text and links, on Scribd:
Be More Creative: What Is Your Self Concept?

28. talentdevelop.com
Presenter: Douglas Eby,
M.A./Psychology
Creator of the
Talent Development Resources
series of sites :