For me, it's simply something that's learned and cultivated. As far as I can tell, my creativity comes from a sense of curiosity in the world around me, a ment

For me, it's simply something that's learned and cultivated. As far as I can tell, my creativity comes from a sense of curiosity in the world around me, a mental flexibility to entertain odd possibilities, and a broad scope of knowledge. This sort of question is asked of cartoonists a lot, and usually, they'll make up some sort of fanciful answer, like "I like to drink coffee with cocoa butter". In reality the very best ones have cultivated a sense of curiosity about edge case situations. They make it a habit to notice odd things, and things that don't quite make sense when you think about it. If you read Bill Watterson's (Calvin and Hobbes) Tenth Anniversary Edition, he talks about this topic, and his answer is that he mainly just sit there and lets his mind wander in front of a blank piece of paper--which to others might look remarkably like goofing off. Hackers in general are the same way, but they get curious about systems and how things work instead. A mental flexibility to entertain possibility helps as well. Often times we're boxed in by our experience, and what we know, as hard as we try to break out of it. When radio was invented, it was asked why you'd want to say stuff to no one in particular. And when the TV came out, the inventor of the radio dismissed it. Here, I think it helps to know how to daydream and let your mind wander. Or when you approach a problem outside your field think of how to solve it using something outside of your expertise. The only person I've ever read about to overcome it was Richard Feynman. Apparently, he had the ability to start from basics from any problem and work his way from the bottom up, aware of his assumptions. Lastly, what's called creative is often just taking two old things that don't usually go together, and getting them to play well with each other. When you know about lots of things and have a broad scope, you start to see how things are interconnected. In school, I liked math, but other kids complained about how they'll never use it. It wasn't until after college that I started to see that the segmentations of subjects is done so that students don't get confused and have discrete chucks of info to learn. In reality, every academic subject is interconnected somehow, and when you have the broadness of scope with deepness in some of them, you'll be able to make connections between things that are related, but not usually thought of as being so. If you can make those connections, people will usually dub you as being creative, when you don't think it's as big of a deal yourself. Being creative is a habit you get into.