For thirty years of academic research and artistic practice, Michael has been trying to answer a single question: what actually makes an idea creative?

Not just clever, effective or vaguely "imaginative." Creative — specifically, structurally, in a way that could actually be named, taught, and maybe even measured (at least subjectively).

Nobody had properly answered that question before. Certainly nobody had turned the answer into something a person could use. 

So he built it himself.

Every genuinely creative idea has to be three things at once: valuable, new, and counterintuitive. 

Michael then realised something no-one else had: each of these requisites requires from you a different capability.  

Expertise is what makes it valuable — knowledge, skill, the thousands of hours it takes to tell a good idea from a bad one. 

Openness is what makes it new — curiosity, humility, the willingness to go looking somewhere nobody told you to look. 

Oddness is what makes it counterintuitive — defiance, disruption, the slightly irrational instinct to break a rule everyone else has quietly agreed to keep.

Michael further realised that these three capabilities can be expressed through three primary archetypes — the Sage, the Explorer and the Trickster — and each of those is manifested through three secondary archetypes. 

That's twelve creative selves in total, each one a genuinely different way of thinking, working, and making something real.

This is probably the first properly systematic account of what creativity actually is — not a collection of tips, but something closer to a grammar. 

For more go to https://www.thecreativearchetypes.com/