Talent is learned, and so is creativity, imo.
You got it right with talent. I've been playing piano since I was three years old. My dad was a musician in his young adult phase and we had an electric piano in my house when I was basically an infant. When I was four or five we finally got an upright which we still have now. So my parents always pushed me to take advantage of the fact that we have an upright sitting around, and ended up getting me music lessons.
I played probably all the way up through high-school, stopped around grade 12 when I realized that the RCM (Royal Conservatory of Music, probably the biggest international organization for pianists) was completely scamming me out of my time and money and that I actually legitimately hated playing the songs from their books (to get to higher grades and whatnot.) All classical or very early modern which all sounded the same to me.
Side note on me hating classical:
Quote:The people who absolutely adore classical music are either the people that don't play any instruments, or rather learned once and never picked it back up, or people that studied it all their lives not only by learning the pieces but analyzing them with counterpoint, harmony, Schillinger Method and likely the history of it all as well. Anyone who doesn't fall into the above categories might not hate classical music, but it definitely won't be their favourite either (if they've actually experienced other genres than what's on the radio.) The pushes between each general era (baroque, classical, romantic) were mainly in regards to the technology available at the time (i.e. baroque will have very little dynamics and will be faster paced because clavichords and harpsichords just weren't able to make dynamics so to actually show any competence playing it would mean playing it quickly and improvising sometimes, then when actual pianos were invented in the early 1800s, dynamics were possible and thus began the classical era.) There was very little done in terms of actual musical experimentation and pushing the boundaries of music that wasn't a direct result of some historical development alone until the early 1900s when jazz and blues started to become more prevalent and more actual musical experimentation was done.
And more or less every pianist I've talked to in a similar situation to me (not the concert pianists or students who just started, I mean who learned at a young age and still continue to play) agrees for the most part.
Alexa, play 4'33" by John Cage.
So instead I went down the path of playing songs I liked, whether I learned them by ear or I was able to find sheet music online.
For some of the songs I played by ear (very early age, like 11yrs old) I would make a Video Response (old YouTube feature) to the original video by the guy who wrote the song (most notably Myuuji/Myuu) and got really good responses back.
And I still know many of the songs so if there's a public use piano in the area and I'm out with people I might just sit down and play.
(I don't hate playing piano, just hate playing songs that are shoved down my throat by RCM from their repertoire.)
And I'll get compliments from all sorts of people saying "I could never do that, you're so lucky to have that talent!"
Like bitch f*** off lmfao, I've literally been playing for 15+ years, you think I could've played this at the ripe age of three?
I get the compliment is with well-intentions, but jeez, pick yourself up and learn to play if you want to learn to play. Don't blow off years of practice as the luck of the draw.
And for creativity, I also think it's learned.
Of course to some people it comes innately. Same goes for talent, really, you see videos of a five year old in China playing a concerto near-perfectly. Of course practice is a big deciding factor to actually harness the talent, but there's some innate dexterity involved, for instance.
And I had a ton of trouble with creativity in the past. Still do, although I've gotten better.
The most interesting take I've seen recently is by YUNG LEAN (hope to see him in concert soon as he's going on tour):
Skip to about five minutes in when he talks about his creative process.
Here's a transcription for the lazy, although it's a fantastic Q&A, my boy Leany getting an award at Trinity.
Quote:For me its like, I hear a lot of songs in colours, and I think there's a word for it, but, if I make a song that song might be like yellow or red, and I start writing ideas so, for Red Bottom Sky I saw leaves, a chainsaw, and I wrote on my iPhone notes where I write everything and I just wrote those words down and I wrote 'castle' and 'go-kart,' whatever. I just write these words down then I send these to a director. [...] then everything else is just spontaneous. The first videos were just after school just hanging out, people thought it was, like, there was so much depth in it, like 'oh he's talking about society and capitalism, and...' it was none of that, you can put any type of aspect into music if you wanted to, and that's what you should do, I love that, I do that, I hear a Beach Boys song and I think think they're talking about whales but they're talking about their morning. That's how music works.
Yeah, he goes a bit off topic there at the end, but he sums up his creative process pretty well, mainly just thinking of ideas and whatever pops into his head then writing it down.
Later in the interview I think he also mentions how for lyrics he would just write down the first thing that comes to mind, then write something after it to rhyme with the rest or keep to a theme. Spontaneity is his form of creativity and it works pretty well.
But even that little off-topic bit at the end is also related to creativity, because people do have their own ideas about stuff, and although they might not attribute the word 'creativity' to those ideas, that's essentially what it is, they're inspired by the song or the video to think about something, something that is unique to their interpretation.
Creativity is a word that I think just has a really bad connotation in people's heads.
If you're able to think about your own ideas, then you're certainly creative because you were able to come up with that idea and then think about it.
It's what comes after creativity that people struggle with and as a result what people think about when you say the word 'creativity.'
Like, as you mentioned someone might struggle with a design, but that's a very subjective way to put it. Maybe that design is what they wanted, but might come across as a 'bad design' because the person who it's for didn't like it, or the people that come across the design don't like it. I'm assuming you're mainly referring to people who do designing as a service, whether it be building a UI for an application or a logo for a company or something.
And at that point I can agree that it's a bad design if it doesn't really fit a certain theme, or doesn't evoke a specific response from the person who encounters it, but at the end of the day it's what the designer came up with and how they managed to get it out of their heads onto a medium which other people can see it.
So when I say that creativity is something that's learned, I mainly refer to the definition of creativity as the above in which it's not about creativity as a mental process, but how your body converts that creativity into something tangible. It's not the actual creativity in someone's head, but just how they get it out of their head. And it's certainly hard to get good at, I mean I went from drawing stick figures as a kid to now doing random anime drawings on those children's colouring mats at restaurants while waiting for my food. It took me a good while of practicing drawing every night and learning anatomy from youtube tutorials and reading lots of guides from ClipStudio's tips of the week, or other guides on DeviantArt. I'm by no means amazing at drawing, but I've gotten comfortable enough that I'm not completely embarrassed when someone asks me to draw a person on the board because I can at least make shapes for guidelines and proportions.
Guides exist for people to learn from, so at the very least there's some degree of a learning element in the creativity to get an idea out of your head and onto the paper.
But the ability to come up with an idea in the first place is entirely innate which everyone should have the capacity to do.
