Creativity is contagious...or is it?

Albert Einstein was a damned clever guy.

Curiously enough, although he was widely regarded as a genius, his brain was smaller than that of the average adult.

I like to think that this proves a pretty important point.

Namely, it’s not always what you have that makes you special, but what you do with what you have.

Old Albert took his smaller-sized brain and went on a journey that helped to change not only the way we viewed the world…but also the way we viewed the universe.

Relatively speaking.

On the way, he ended up figuring out a thing or two about the way we viewed ourselves.

He came to believe, for instance, that imagination was more important than knowledge.

I agree.

So…up yours, Ben Franklin!

And he said something that barged into my brain and put down roots. Namely:

“Creativity is contagious, pass it on.”

Before that, I’d always viewed creativity as a muscle. Not a virus.

The more you use it the stronger it gets. The stronger it gets the faster you think. The faster you think the more thoughts you have. The more thoughts you have the more possibilities open up to you.

The world of advertising has many folk with muscles between their ears.

Mind you, it also has others with nothing but vacant space there.

Anyway…the thought that creativity could be contagious…that you could pass on whatever leaps of imagination you had merely by coming into direct contact with someone else…was almost intoxicating.

The idea that you could communicate a concept merely by touch…from your brain to someone else’s, via osmosis through the skin membrane…was like a door opening somewhere inside my skull.

If true, it would have been churlish of me NOT to take full advantage of this exquisite ability.

So I did.

From that moment, I decided to shake the hand of every creative I met.

Vigorously…at great length…and as often as possible.

Whatever creative talents I had (whether I was aware of them or not) I was determined to share with as many people as I could.

Whether they wanted me to, or not.

And by doing so…I would receive in return whatever talents they shared with me. Knowingly or not.

It worked well for a while.

Then something strange happened.

Something unexpected.

Something alarming.

No long after I began my regimen of hand shaking, I noticed that some of my creative colleagues rebuffed my attempts at direct skin on skin contact.

A few retreated to a safe distance. Glaring.

One or two even threatened physical violence if I ever tried to invade their personal space with any of my uninvited palm-on-palm shit.

Maybe they believed their creativity would become more powerful and more effective if they kept it safe inside their skin, instead of letting it seep out through their pores.

Maybe they only wanted to pass on their precious mentoring talents to a select few, as and when they saw fit.  

So, reluctantly, I stopped shaking hands. I even put my high fives and fistbumps on hold.

Then something strange happened.

Something unexpected.

Something alarming.

Slowly.

Bit by bit.

I began to feel less creative…