Is Creativity a Skill? Why It Grows the More You Use It

Some people believe you are either creative or not. Others feel that a hard month has drained their creativity, as if ideas were a tank that slowly runs empty. The line above says the opposite: creativity is a skill, and using it gives you more of it. Is that just a nice thought from a poet, or does research agree with her?

The short answer: creative thinking responds to practice, and practice works best when it becomes a regular habit. Here is what the research shows and what it means for your week.

Where the quote comes from

Maya Angelou said these words in an interview for "Creativity: It's the Thought that Counts", an article by Mary Ardito in Bell Telephone Magazine in 1982. She was the first person in a series about people whose work showed creativity, and the line was later quoted in the book Conversations with Maya Angelou. You may also see the quote credited to Oscar Wilde, but there is no evidence for that, as Quote Investigator shows in its full history of the saying.

Creativity is a skill you can train

If creative ability were fixed at birth, creativity training would change nothing. Creativity researchers have tested this. In 2004, Ginamarie Scott, Lyle Leritz and Michael Mumford combined the results of 70 studies of creativity training programs in a meta-analysis. Well-designed programs typically improved creative performance, and the effect held across different tasks, settings and groups of people.

The most useful detail is which programs worked best. They trained concrete thinking skills and gave people realistic exercises from their own field. So the creative skill did not come from inspiration or a special mood, but from practice on real problems.

This is not a promise of a higher IQ or a different brain. Creative growth works like any other skill: the first time you look for five different angles on a problem, it feels slow and awkward, but after many rounds it starts to feel normal.

Why "the more you use" is about habit

A skill grows with practice, but practice only happens if you keep coming back to it. That is where habit research helps a creative routine.

In a study published in 2010, Phillippa Lally and colleagues asked 96 volunteers to pick one small daily behavior and repeat it in the same situation, for example "after breakfast", for 12 weeks. Every day, people rated how automatic the behavior felt. With repetition it became more automatic, quickly at first and then more slowly. On average it took about 66 days to get close to the limit, but the range was huge, from 18 to 254 days, and missing one day did not really hurt the process.

Three lessons for a creative habit:

1. Tie it to a cue. Use the same time or place every day: morning coffee, the commute or the end of the workday.
2. Keep it small. A few minutes on one question is easy enough to repeat tomorrow.
3. Don't restart after a missed day. One gap is fine, while long breaks are the real problem.

What creative practice looks like

Creativity training worked best on real problems, so pick a topic you care about: a decision at work, a personal project or a doubt you keep postponing. The practice itself is producing and judging your own ideas. Reading someone else's finished answer feels productive, but it trains your reading, not your creative thinking.

Your creative habit in Ideation

Ideation is built for short creative sessions where you do the thinking:

1. Write a topic: a goal, a question or a doubt.
2. Pick up to three roles. Universal, Critic and Motivator are free, and each gives a different angle.
3. Keep the thoughts that click, delete the rest, and tap one to go deeper.
4. Write your own thoughts in the field at the bottom. They go straight to Favorites.
5. Tap Keep thinking when you want more nudges on the same level.

Neurons work as a progress counter for your own thinking. You earn them for new topics, your own thoughts, context, favorites and deleting thoughts, and they add up to ten levels, from Newbie to Creative. They count what you do, not what the AI writes. If you stay away for more than three days, neurons slowly start to fade, like any creative skill without practice. More about how the app works is on the help page.

Creativity does not run out when you use it. It runs low when you stop using it.