Guide
How to be more creative: what the evidence supports
You get more creative by practising specific moves, such as generating a quota of ideas before judging any of them or setting yourself a deliberate constraint, not by resolving to be more imaginative. Personality plays a part, but it is not destiny, and change from deliberate practice is real though modest, on the order of a third of a standard deviation over about six months.
Last updated September 16, 2026.
Is creativity fixed, or can you actually build it?
Creativity is one of the 24 character strengths in the VIA classification, grouped under the virtue of wisdom alongside curiosity, judgment, love of learning and perspective (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). Framed that way, it is something you are praised for and can decide to use, not a fixed quantity you either have or lack.
Be honest about what the strength buys you. In a survey of 5,299 adults, the strengths most consistently linked to life satisfaction were hope, zest, gratitude, love and curiosity. Creativity, grouped with the other intellectual strengths, was only weakly related to it (Park et al., 2004). So the case for building creativity is not that it will make you happier. It is that originality is a strength worth having on its own terms, and that it responds to practice more than to a resolution.
What kind of personality tends to be more creative?
A meta-analysis comparing more and less creative scientists, and artists with non-artists, found a consistent profile: creative people score higher on openness, self-confidence, self-acceptance, drive, ambition, dominance, hostility and impulsivity, and lower on conventionality and conscientiousness, with the same dimensions distinguishing creative people in science and in art alike (Feist, 1998).
None of that is a licence. Hostility and impulsivity showing up in the data does not make them useful, only something that turned up more often in these samples than in the comparison groups. The finding worth acting on is the openness one: creative output tracks a willingness to entertain the unfamiliar, not a temperament you would have to adopt.
Openness itself is not one thing. Each Big Five domain splits into two correlated aspects, and Openness to Experience divides into an Openness aspect and an Intellect aspect (DeYoung et al., 2007). Creative work leans on the first, making and imagining, closer to imagination than to abstract reasoning, which is why the practices below aim at producing and combining rather than at analysing.
What actually changes creative behaviour, if wanting to isn't enough?
Wanting to change is not nothing. Across two 16-week studies, wanting to change was followed by measured change, and specific plans helped more than general intentions (Hudson & Fraley, 2015). The plans that worked named a behaviour, a time and a situation, not a general aim to be more creative.
Deliberately using a strength you already have moves the outcomes that matter day to day. Across 29 effect sizes from 14 articles, signature strengths interventions raised life satisfaction (g = 0.42) and positive affect (g = 0.32), and lowered reported low mood (g = 0.21), though the evidence base is still small (Schutte & Malouff, 2019). The lever is use, applying a strength somewhere new, not simply knowing you have it.
Set your expectations by the size of the effect, not by the promise of a total overhaul. A systematic review of 207 intervention studies found trait measures moving by about a third of a standard deviation over roughly six months, largest for Emotional Stability, and drawn mostly from therapy and counselling trials (Roberts et al., 2017).
What five practices actually build creativity?
Each of these turns a vague intention into a specific, repeatable move, the same shape as the implementation intentions that outperformed a simpler nudge in the Hudson and Fraley trials (Hudson & Fraley, 2015).
| Practice | What it means | What it exercises |
|---|---|---|
| A quota of bad ideas before choosing one | Write down ten or twenty options before judging any, on purpose including the obvious and the silly | Fluency: separating generating from filtering, so the filter stops arriving early |
| A constraint on purpose | Give yourself a limit you did not have to have, a word count, a single tool, a fixed budget | Working productively inside a boundary rather than waiting for a blank page |
| Combine two unrelated things | Pick two objects, fields or ideas with nothing obvious in common and force a working connection between them | Associative thinking, the openness aspect of Openness rather than the intellect aspect (DeYoung et al., 2007) |
| A daily ten-minute making habit | A short, protected slot each day for producing something small and finishing it | Consistency: turning a disposition into a scheduled behaviour rather than a mood |
| Consume outside your lane | Read, watch or listen to something from a field, a country or a decade you would not normally reach for | Raw material: the input a mind needs before it has anything to recombine |
None of these depend on talent. They depend on being repeated on a schedule rather than saved for when a project deserves them (Hudson & Fraley, 2015).
Does becoming more creative mean becoming more artistic?
No. The word carries a class assumption the strength does not share. A rota that finally works, a repair improvised from what was in the drawer, a lesson plan that makes a stuck idea click, all count as originality doing its job, and none of them touch a canvas.
The personality research backs this up: the traits distinguishing more creative scientists from less creative ones are the same traits distinguishing artists from non-artists (Feist, 1998). The practices above apply as well to a spreadsheet or a supply chain as to a page.
How does Wellington measure creativity?
Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.
The free Snapshot is 60 questions, about 7 minutes, and scores six dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility. The first ten questions are answered before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email address so your answers are saved and your results can be shown. There is no card. The Snapshot does not score character strengths.
Creativity is scored from 5 statements on a five-point accuracy scale, and it is one of the 90 traits with the membership, which adds the Portrait, 336 questions in 4 chapters, alongside all 24 VIA character strengths and every Big Five facet.
Every trait is reported as a percentile against the reference sample. The three bands (Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above) and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. For creativity, Quiet is The Steady Craftsman (You would rather do the known thing beautifully than the new thing badly), Balanced is The Practical Maker (Original when it counts, sensible the rest of the time), and High is The Tinkerer's Eye (You see the second use of everything before the first is finished). Those norms are provisional until the norming sample is complete.
Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not built for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.
Questions people ask
- How long does it take to see a difference?
- Weeks to months, and modestly. A systematic review of intervention studies found trait measures moving by about a third of a standard deviation over roughly six months (Roberts et al., 2017). People who wanted to change a trait showed measurable movement within 16 weeks, and specific if-then plans moved them further than a general wish to be more creative (Hudson & Fraley, 2015).
- Do I need to be naturally open to get more creative?
- It helps, but it is not a gate. Openness splits into an openness aspect and an intellect aspect, with creative work leaning on the first (DeYoung et al., 2007). Someone lower on Openness can still practise the moves above, since fluency and deliberate combination are behaviours you rehearse, not only a temperament you were issued.
- Is generating a quota of bad ideas actually useful, or is that a myth?
- The logic holds up: judging an idea while you are still producing options shuts off the supply early, because the two are different mental moves. Separating them, generate first, choose after, is the simplest way to stop your own filter from doing its job too soon.
- Is creativity only useful in creative jobs?
- No. The traits behind it distinguish more and less creative people in science and art equally (Feist, 1998), and the strength shows up anywhere a problem needs a new answer: a process, a repair, a plan. Treating it as decoration for artistic work undersells what it is for.
Sources
Peer-reviewed sources for the claims above. Wellington's own reliability figures will be published once the norming sample is complete.
- Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford University Press and the American Psychological Association.
- Park, N., Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Strengths of character and well-being. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23(5), 603–619.
- Feist, G. J. (1998). A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2(4), 290–309.
- DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880–896.
- Schutte, N. S., & Malouff, J. M. (2019). The impact of signature character strengths interventions: A meta-analysis. Journal of Happiness Studies, 20(4), 1179–1196.
- Hudson, N. W., & Fraley, R. C. (2015). Volitional personality trait change: Can people choose to change their personality traits? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(3), 490–507.
- Roberts, B. W., Luo, J., Briley, D. A., Chow, P. I., Su, R., & Hill, P. L. (2017). A systematic review of personality trait change through intervention. Psychological Bulletin, 143(2), 117–141.
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