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💡 The Big Idea: You didn’t lose your creativity. You were trained out of it.

In the late 1960s, NASA had a real problem.

They were trying to put a man on the Moon, something that had never been done before. To do so, they needed engineers and scientists who could solve problems no one had ever seen before.

Being smart wasn’t enough. They needed to be inventive.

So they commissioned a researcher named George Land to build an assessment that could help them identify their most creative people.

The test measured what psychologists call divergent thinking, which is your ability to look at something ordinary and generate lots of possibilities. For example, how many uses can you think of for a paperclip? Or how many ways can you come up with to improve a typical table fork?

The test worked. NASA used it to find their best creative thinkers, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But then Land did something else nobody was paying him to do. He got curious about where creativity actually comes from — and to find out, he gave the same test NASA used on their most creative rocket scientists to 1,600 five-year-old kids.

What he found was astounding.

98% of those five-year-olds who took Land’s test scored at the creative genius level.

That’s right, almost every kindergartner who took the test outperformed the most inventive engineers at NASA.

Land’s conclusion wasn’t that the children he tested were special. It was something a little more uncomfortable for us adults who struggle with creating: creative genius is the default setting. It’s not a rare gift handed out to a lucky few. It’s standard equipment, and somewhere along the line, we forget how to access it.

You have it. I have it. And we’ve had it from the very beginning.

The Steady Decline of Creativity in Adults

After his initial findings, Land turned his study into a longitudinal one. He followed those same kids and retested them as they grew up.

• At age 10, the number of kids scoring at genius levels had dropped from 98% to 30%.
• At age 15, it was only 12%.
• And when the same test was given to adults, only 2% remained.

This lines up with what researcher Kyung Hee Kim found from analyzing over 270,000 scores from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (the gold standard of creativity testing) collected across five decades. Her finding: since 1990, American creativity scores have been steadily declining, even while IQ scores keep rising.

We are literally getting smarter and less creative at the same time.

So whatever you think of a study from the 1960s, the core claim survives: creativity isn’t scarce at the start. Something happens as we age and we lose it along the way.

Land’s explanation is tied to understanding two kinds of thinking:

• Divergent thinking generates possibilities. It’s expansive, playful, and completely unconcerned with whether an idea is any good.
• Convergent thinking evaluates. It tests, criticizes, and narrows things down to the right answer.

Both are essential. A five-year-old who never converges just makes a mess. An adult who never diverges just makes a spreadsheet.

But here’s the problem: school (and later, work) trains us to run both modes at the same time. Every idea gets graded the moment it appears. Raise your hand, but only if you’re sure. Brainstorm, but don’t say anything dumb. Write, but make it great on the first pass.

Eventually, we stop creating because we can’t live up to the standard we create for ourselves.

Your creativity didn’t die. It went quiet because every idea now gets judged on arrival.

If you’ve ever sat down to write and struggled with a blinking cursor, you know exactly what this feels like.

But that doesn't mean you're not creative. It just means that your inner critic has been showing up uninvited.

The Creative Genius Is Still in There

As scary as the findings from Land’s study can be, the main point is this:

The capability to create never goes away.

Land was adamant about this. The divergent thinking you had at five isn’t gone — it’s suppressed. He pointed out that you still use it every night when you're dreaming.

So your job isn’t to become creative. You already are. Your job is to separate the two modes again, to give your ideas a space where they can show up without being judged, and save the grading for later.

Easier said than done.

When you sit down to “be creative,” both modes show up together out of pure habit. You can’t just decide to separate them. Decades of training don’t unwind because you read a newsletter. You need a process that separates them for you.

That’s the real job of the Creativity Flywheel.

The Creativity Flywheel is a five-stage framework to help understand the creative process that gets activated when making things: Capture → Curate → Connect → Cultivate → Create. It takes the ideas you’re already collecting and moves them, deliberately, toward finished work that is unmistakably yours.

I call it a flywheel because each turn 1) produces more, and 2) becomes easier. At its essence, it's a creative system that builds momentum without relying on willpower.

But here’s the part that matters most for everything we just learned from Land: the Flywheel’s real value isn’t organization. Each stage of the wheel works best when you're activating one mode of thinking at a time. Some stages belong entirely to your divergent five-year-old, others to your convergent inner critic.

If you want to awaken your inner creative genius, you have to be able to switch back and forth.

Here’s how the modes map to the five stages:

Capture is pure divergent thinking. When something resonates, you write it down. That’s the entire job. You’re not deciding whether it’s important. You’re not deciding whether it’s original. Resonance is the only entry requirement. Your inner five-year-old runs this stage, and the critic isn’t invited.

Curate is convergent. Later, you go back through what you’ve collected and decide what’s actually worth keeping. This is where the critic finally gets to do their job, on material that already exists. That ordering matters more than it seems: judging ideas after they’re captured refines them. Judging ideas before they’re captured kills them.

Connect is divergent again. This is where you play matchmaker with your notes. What does this idea remind you of? What happens if these two thoughts sit next to each other? There are no wrong answers at this stage. The entire point is generating combinations nobody asked for. Of the five stages, this is the one that feels the most like being five years old again.

Cultivate is where the modes take turns. Ideas need time to grow, and while they do, you keep coming back to them. Sometimes while adding wild new possibilities (divergent), sometimes while trimming and shaping what’s already there (convergent). The key is that on any given visit, you’re doing one or the other. Never both at once.

Create is the harvest. By the time you sit down to actually write, most of the creative work is already done. You’re not staring at a blank page waiting for genius to strike. You’re simply assembling something from ideas you already captured, curated, and connected.

It turns out the blank page was never the problem. Starting from a blank page was.

And that’s the secret hiding inside the Creativity Flywheel. It isn’t really an organizational system. It’s a machine for keeping your five-year-old and your inner critic in separate rooms until you need them. Each one gets their own stage. Neither one can sabotage the other. And the wheel keeps turning, because everything you create sparks new things to capture.

If you’ve got a vault full of highlights and half-finished notes that never turn into anything — this is why. It’s not a PKM problem. It’s a creative mode problem.

Two Ways to Start This Week

You don’t need to build the whole Flywheel today. You just need to get the first stage spinning.

Here are two things you can do right now to help you get started:

1. Create a judgment-free capture habit. Pick one place where every idea gets written down, and none of it gets evaluated on arrival. It could be a notes app, a pocket notebook, or whatever’s closest. The destination doesn't matter; you just need a place to put things. Remember, you’re not committing to anything. You’re just refusing to let ideas leak out of your head because they weren’t impressive enough at the beginning.
2. Do Land’s homework. Land had a challenge he liked to give adults: take an ordinary table fork and come up with 25 or 30 ways to improve it. It takes a few minutes, most of the ideas will be ridiculous, and that’s the entire point. You’re not designing forks. You’re remembering what divergent mode feels like when the grade doesn’t matter — because it’s just a fork.

Neither of these activities requires a lick of talent. Just permission to make something without judgment.

The Bottom Line: You’re Not Uncreative. You’re Undersupported.

The numbers from Land’s study look depressing at first: 98 to 30 to 12 to 2. Like watching something wither in time-lapse.

But flip it around, and it’s the most hopeful finding in the whole science of creativity. If 98% of us started at genius level and only 2% of adults still score there, then the 2% aren’t special. They’re not the chosen ones. They’re just the people who, through luck, stubbornness, or the right process, protected a mode of thinking the rest of us were taught to suppress.

Which means the gap between you and them isn’t talent. It’s support. A place for ideas to land without judgment. A stage for the critic that comes after the capture, not during. A process that lets your five-year-old and your editor take turns instead of wrestling for the pen.

You already passed the test. You passed it when you were five.

You are creative.

— Mike