Here’s some good news: you absolutely do not have to be intelligent to be creative. Research (and believe me, there is tonnes of it) suggests that there is no correlation between the two attributes. When IQs go past 120, the human brain just goes into overdrive trying to do things logically rather than in a novel way, possibly even stifling creative ideas in the process.

This may explain why intelligent people do not waste their lives trying to create music, write great poetry, paint things on the side of buildings, or dissect cows and put maggots in them before displaying them in formaldehyde. That said, if your IQ does happen to be under 120, then there is a correlation between intelligence and creativity, and sadly, it is not in your favour. That might explain buildings in the shape of elephants, elevated highways that come to an abrupt end 30 metres above the ground, greens on islands on golf courses that you need to catch a boat to reach, Hawaiian pizza or any dish that feels it can be enhanced with pineapple, and maybe the someone who paid US$16.5m for Damien Hirst’s calf.

After a long, and if I am honest, mostly not very creative career in the media industry, I have come to the undeniable conclusion that any department in a media business with the word “creative” in front of it is most likely anything but that. These delusional people typically label themselves as “award-winning” but wisely omit to say that the award was given years ago for a campaign for an in-house newsletter that never got sent. My heart goes out to them because there can be nothing worse than having to go to work each day with the instruction to produce something creative, award-winning, or otherwise.

Einstein opined that imagination was more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited, he said, whereas imagination circles the world. His imagination created the theory of relativity, and it is said that his IQ—if it had ever been measured—most likely was at the top of the range at 160 using today’s accepted upper limit. Does this debunk the postulation above that superintelligence is not necessary to be highly creative? I do not think so, or Einstein might have turned his mind to conceiving the theory of creativity, which would have arguably been more useful than trying to work out what gravity is all about.

So how do we nurture creativity, and what exactly is it? I suggest we train our educators to let their young students’ minds roam wild. We need to stop forcing ideas on our young and give them options and alternatives so they make their own decisions. As the American psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “Almost all creativity requires purposeful play.” Then let our children play purposefully as they create their fantastic futures.

The best I can offer on how creativity is sparked is the Janusian thinking model, which suggests creativity occurs by the conceiving of two opposite concepts or ideas simultaneously and then playing them off one another to come up with something new. Come to think of it, that was exactly how this magazine was created. We took the idea of a luxury lifestyle magazine and another publication with good things to read in it and came up with the concept that advocacy, sustainability, responsibility, and something interesting to read in a nicely designed magazine and website would be a fun and noble thing to put together.

As for the “theory of creativity”, how about C=ME2, where C equals creativity and ME is mind exploration.

One more gin and tonic, please.