Creativity has long been the buzzword of choice for entrepreneurs, inventors, and visionary types looking to market themselves. It has become nearly synonymous with genius. There appears to be no shortage of creativity anywhere; a steady stream of articles on improving one’s creativity can be found in just about every nook, corner, and cranny imaginable. For instance, a Google search on improving + creativity will churn up some 85,000,000 results.
Yet, a search of creativity’s lesser-known twin sibling, improving + destructivity, will only yield about thirty-five thousand results.
I’m not talking about the garden variety nihilist here, but the selective kind of destructivity that permits someone to cut through the endless swath of backward metaphors, hyperboles, oxymorons, and figures of speech in our world to find out what truly matters, what doesn’t, and where the path of least resistance lies.
The sculptor does not look at a block of marble then start decorating it with ribbons and paint.
The whittler does not look at a block of wood and start gluing more stuff on it.
The destructive genius wields Ockham’s Razor as if it were… Ockham’s Razor.
Consider the following two sentences:
1) “Jimmy grew from 5′ 11” to 6′ 6” in three years.”
2) “Jimmy’s a skyscraper of a man who shot up like a rocket in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
One may have been written by a destructive genius while the other by a creative one.
One has substance and the other has flair.
One is all icing and the other is all cake.
One genius is living in the other’s shadow.