July 3, 2026Everyone Has Creativity, Even If They Don’t Believe It

I have sat across from a lot of people who tell me, almost as a matter of pride, that they are not creative. They say it the way someone might admit they are bad at math. It is not my thing. That is for the designers, the artists, the people with the right kind of brain. What struck me during my conversation with Nir Bashan is how confidently and how often he pushes back on that idea. Creativity, he told me, is not a personality trait you either have or don’t. It is a method. And methods can be learned by anyone willing to try.

Bashan is the author of The Creator Mindset, a book that landed on the list of the top 100 nonfiction books of all time, and he has spent years teaching creativity inside companies that most people would not describe as creative playgrounds. AT&T, Microsoft, EA Sports, JetBlue. These are not art studios. They are operations built on data, efficiency, and process. Yet Bashan has built a career showing these organizations that it is not the opposite of structure. It is what happens when structure runs out of answers.

🎥 Watch and listen to the full interview about creativity here

Why We Wait Until Everything Else Fails

The most interesting thing Bashan said to me was not really about creativity at all. It was about timing. He pointed out that it almost never shows up first. It shows up last, after every conventional tool has been tried and has come up short. That is a strange thing to sit with. We tend to think of creative people as the ones who lead with imagination, who skip straight to the wild idea. But in Bashan’s experience working with real businesses, creativity is usually the thing people reach for only once everything sensible has already failed.

I have seen this pattern play out in my own work too. Teams will run the numbers, adjust the pricing, tweak the process, and optimize every lever they can find. And when none of it moves the needle, there is a kind of exhausted silence in the room. That silence, according to Bashan, is exactly where creativity begins. Not because people suddenly become more artistic, but because they finally run out of the answers they already knew.

This matters more than it sounds like it should. If creativity only shows up after everything else has failed, then most organizations are structurally set up to delay it as long as possible. Leaders reward the safe, measurable, data-backed decision. They rarely reward the untested idea, at least not until the safe options have already been exhausted. Bashan’s insight reframes it not as a luxury for good times, but as a resource that gets activated precisely when things get hard. That alone should change how leaders think about when to invite creative thinking into the room, rather than treating it as a last resort nobody planned for.

The Epic Pass and the Room That Laughed

Bashan told me a story that I have not been able to stop thinking about since. For years, the ski industry tried to solve its revenue problem the traditional way. They optimized lift speeds. They adjusted pricing models. They studied every data point they could find about skier behavior. None of it fixed the core problem, which was that ski resort revenue was wildly unpredictable from season to season.

Then someone at Vail Resorts suggested something that sounded almost reckless. Sell an entire season pass, up front, for four or five hundred dollars. Get people to commit their money months before the first snowfall, when nobody even knew what the winter would look like. Bashan said the room laughed. Not a polite laugh either. A real one, the kind that tells you an idea sounds ridiculous to everyone hearing it for the first time.

That idea became the Epic Pass. It sold out in hours. And it did not just fix one resort’s revenue problem. It reshaped how an entire industry thinks about pricing, loyalty, and customer commitment. It is one of Bashan’s favorite examples of what happens when a business finally lets an unconventional idea through.

Traditional solutions stop working, and then we need to be creative in order to overcome.

I keep returning to the detail about the laughter, because it tells you something important about how creativity actually gets received in real organizations. It rarely arrives looking polished. It usually arrives looking foolish, at least at first glance, because it breaks from whatever logic the room has been operating under. The people who eventually build it into their culture are not the ones who avoid that laughter. They are the ones who learn to sit through it and ask whether the idea has real merit underneath the discomfort.

Creativity Is a Method, Not a Personality Trait

This is probably the core of everything Bashan believes, and it is worth slowing down on. Most people treat creativity as something you are born with, like eye color. You either have the creative gene or you do not, and if you do not, the best you can do is hire someone who does. Bashan rejects that framing entirely. In his view, creativity is closer to a skill like negotiation or public speaking. It has a process. It can be practiced. It gets stronger with repetition.

We are all creative human beings. It’s in our DNA, it’s who we are. We are sometimes very far away from that creativity, but ultimately traditional solutions stop working.

That line stayed with me for a while after we spoke. Far away from creativity is a much more honest description of most working adults than not creative. Kids do not need to be taught to make things up, to build worlds out of cardboard boxes, to ask a hundred unreasonable questions in a row. That capacity does not disappear. It gets buried under years of being told to stay in your lane, follow the process, and stick to what is proven. By the time people reach a leadership role, many of them have spent decades practicing the opposite of creativity without even realizing it.

If creativity is a method rather than a trait, that changes the whole conversation about who gets to be creative at work. It stops being a hiring problem, where you go find the one designer or copywriter who can carry the creative load for the whole team. It becomes a training problem, where creativity gets built into how everyone approaches their job, regardless of title. That is a much harder shift to make, because it asks leaders to change habits and systems rather than just add a new person to the org chart. But it is also a far more sustainable one.

What Skeptics Actually Need to See

I asked Bashan how he gets skeptics on board, because in almost every organization there is at least one person who genuinely believes creativity does not belong in their world. His answer was refreshingly practical. He does not try to convince skeptics with philosophy. He shows them results. The Epic Pass story works precisely because it is not abstract. It is a real business, with real revenue numbers, solving a real problem that traditional methods could not touch.

This tells me something about how creativity actually spreads inside organizations. It does not spread through inspiration alone. It spreads through proof. Skeptics are not usually wrong to be skeptical. Plenty of things get labeled creative that are really just impulsive or untested. What convinces a skeptic is seeing a specific example where an unconventional idea produced a measurable outcome that the traditional approach could not deliver. Once that happens, the conversation shifts from whether it works to how it can be applied to their own problem.

This is also why storytelling matters so much in how Bashan teaches creativity. A concept like the creator mindset can sound vague if you only describe it in the abstract. But once you attach it to a story about a laughing room and a sold-out season pass, it becomes something people can hold onto and repeat to their own teams later. Good stories do the convincing that arguments alone cannot.

Building Creativity Into Everyday Business Operations

One thing that separates Bashan’s approach from a lot of creativity advice is that he is not asking companies to hold occasional brainstorming retreats and call it a day. He is talking about weaving it into the actual operations of a business, the same way you would weave in quality control or customer service standards. That is a much bigger ask, and it is also why his work resonates with companies as procedural as JetBlue or as data-driven as Microsoft.

What does that look like in practice? It starts with accepting that traditional tools have limits. Data and efficiency can take a team a long way, but they cannot solve every problem, especially the ones that do not have historical precedent. The ski industry had plenty of data. What it did not have was a new idea about how people commit to spending money before they know what they are buying. No spreadsheet was going to generate that insight on its own.

From there, it means treating creativity not as an occasional spark but as a repeatable process that gets triggered once traditional approaches are exhausted. Bashan’s framing is useful here because it gives teams permission to try the conventional approach first without feeling like they are avoiding creativity. You are not skipping creative thinking by starting with data. You are simply following the natural order of problem solving, and creativity becomes the next step once the obvious paths are closed.

It also means using real examples, the way the Epic Pass story gets used, to show teams what creative thinking actually produces in dollars and results rather than just in mood boards or brainstorming sessions. And it means constantly reminding people that creativity is not about art or personality. It is about finding a way forward when the usual paths are blocked. That reframing alone removes a lot of the resistance people carry into the conversation, because it stops asking them to be artistic and starts asking them to be resourceful.

Leadership’s Role in Unlocking Creativity

The more I think about this conversation, the more I keep landing on one idea: creativity is less about individual talent and more about environment. Bashan’s work with major companies is not really about teaching people a new skill from scratch. It is about giving them permission to use one they already have but have been trained to suppress.

Leaders set that environment, whether they intend to or not. A team that gets punished for a failed unconventional idea will stop offering unconventional ideas, even if the punishment only happened once. A team that watches a leader laugh off an untested suggestion, the way that room in Bashan’s story initially did, learns quickly that ideas outside the norm are not welcome, at least until proven otherwise by someone with enough standing to survive the laughter.

This is where I think a lot of companies get it backwards. They treat creativity as something to import through workshops or consultants, rather than something to protect internally through how leaders respond in the moment an unconventional idea gets raised. The person who first suggested the Epic Pass needed a room willing to actually consider the idea after the laughter died down, not just a room capable of laughing. That willingness to keep listening is a leadership choice, not a personality trait, and it is one every leader can practice regardless of their natural comfort with ambiguity.

I have also noticed that creativity tends to survive best in organizations where failure is treated as data rather than as a verdict on someone’s judgment. Bashan’s larger point about it showing up once traditional solutions fail only works if people are allowed to admit that the traditional solutions failed in the first place. In cultures where admitting failure feels dangerous, teams will keep running the same exhausted playbook long past the point where it stopped working, simply because trying something new feels riskier than staying quiet.

Why Creativity Deserves a Bigger Seat at the Table

What makes this conversation especially interesting to me is how much business value gets left on the table when creativity is treated as optional. Bashan has worked with organizations across wildly different industries, from technology to sports to hardware retail, and the common thread is that none of them succeeded by only using it. They succeeded by combining creativity with the same discipline and data orientation they already had. It did not replace their traditional approach. It supplemented it at the exact moment that approach stopped producing results.

That is a more useful way to think about creativity than the popular image of the lone genius striking inspiration out of nowhere. Real creative thinking, at least the kind Bashan teaches, is disciplined. It follows a process. It gets applied deliberately, at the point where traditional tools run out of road. That process can be taught to auditors, hardware distributors, airline staff, and sports marketers just as easily as it can be taught to musicians and Hollywood creatives, which is exactly the discovery that shaped Bashan’s whole career after working alongside entertainment stars and realizing they were not fundamentally different from the executives he now coaches.

I think that is the lesson worth carrying forward. Creativity is not reserved for a special category of people. It is a capacity every person in your organization already carries, whether they believe it about themselves or not. The real question is not who has it and who does not. It is whether your organization gives people permission to use that capacity once the usual answers stop working. If you want to explore how Bashan applies this thinking to real businesses, you can learn more about his work as a creativity and innovation speaker through his speaker profile.

Creativity as a Practice, Not a Rescue Plan

If there is one shift I would encourage any leader to make after this conversation, it is to stop treating creativity as an emergency measure and start treating it as a practiced discipline. Yes, it tends to show up once traditional solutions fail, but that does not mean it should only be summoned in a crisis. Teams that practice creative thinking regularly, even when things are going fine, tend to recognize the moment traditional solutions stop working much faster than teams that have never exercised that muscle before.

This connects to something broader Bashan believes about professional development and leadership. Creativity is not separate from those disciplines. It is a core part of them. A leader who cannot access creative thinking when the data runs dry is a leader who will eventually run out of good decisions to make. And a team that has never practiced creative problem solving will freeze exactly when the moment calls for it most, because that muscle has never been exercised before the pressure arrived.

Bashan’s work also touches on corporate culture in a way I found genuinely useful. Culture is often described in terms of values or mission statements, but Bashan’s version of culture is much more concrete. It is whether people feel safe proposing the idea that might get laughed at in the room, the way the Epic Pass idea did before it became one of the most successful pricing innovations in the history of the ski industry. Culture, in that sense, is not what a company says about creative capacity. It is what actually happens the moment someone tries to be creative out loud.

The Lesson That Stayed With Me

By the end of our conversation, I kept coming back to one idea. Everyone has it in them. Not everyone believes it, and not everyone practices it, but the capacity for creativity itself is not rare. What is rare is an environment that gives people permission to use it, and a leader willing to sit through the laughter long enough to hear whether the idea underneath is worth pursuing.

That is really the heart of what Bashan teaches, whether he is working with a Fortune 500 company or speaking to a room full of executives who insist they are not the creative type. It is not about art. It is not about personality. It is about resourcefulness in the moment when the usual playbook stops working. The organizations that understand this treat creativity not as a department or a personality quirk, but as a discipline that belongs everywhere, from finance to operations to customer service.

I think the most valuable takeaway from this conversation is permission. Permission to admit that the traditional approach has stopped working. Permission to propose the idea that might get laughed at. Permission to believe, even after years of being told otherwise, that creativity was never something you lacked. It was only something you had not been asked to use.

🎥 Watch the full interview with Nir Bashan here

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