The price of creativity

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Henry Ford Health. What if medical expertise could travel far beyond the hospital? This led Henry Ford Health doctors to develop remote ultrasound diagnostics used by astronauts. More at henryford.com/science for the win. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at at TED conferences To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. It feels like everywhere you look, people are making and crafting and writing and taking photos to share online. Today is my official three year anniversary as a content creator. So I make my own clothes. I love this dress. I'm building a tiny home for my sister. But where is all this creativity coming from? A word like creativity feels eternal, as natural as air. It's like the base level of all of life. ZOMORODI: This is entrepreneur, musician and writer Yancy Strickler. He is a sort of creativity history buff. Well, a common mistake we all make is assuming that the world around us has always been this way. And this is even the case when it comes to ideas that are as bedrock as art and creativity. But in the 1940s, the U. S. Government started taking these fields very seriously. And in part from Department of Defense, research and funding. Post World War two, people were worried about American society becoming too homogeneous, and The US was worried about facing off against the Soviet Union. And so they needed individuality to to contend with this totalitarian society. The things about us are made to express our own free spirits and desires. So the Defense Department and some social scientists began to study this question of what to do about it. What do we do about this issue of conformity? On come the developments of ideas in pace with the emphatic decisions of the American people as to what they want. This is when there were more white collar workers than blue collar workers for the first time. And they ended up proposing, a concept of something called creativity, which they discovered after studying artists and engineers, in particular engineers who pulled all nighters, and they wanted to understand what made them work, what motivated them. To do that, they gave them everything from Rorschach tests to the Myers Briggs personality test. And they found that these people had this internal drive to make things better. They had to they're just driven in that way. So they began to theorize that what …