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Adults think they're not creative, but children do. That's true, isn't it? Broadly speaking?
In fact, I want to give you a quick test, if I could.
How creative do you think you are personally? Where would you put yourself on a scale of one to ten?
While you're thinking about that, have a think about this. How intelligent are you on a scale of one to ten?
How about ten? Any Tens? No?
Nine? Thank you. Two at the back, Thank you. Actually, you can go now. - we're just wasting your time, honestly.
Eight?
Seven? Six?
Five? Four?
Three? -- it's getting tense, isn't it?
Two?Any twos? Okay.
I never do one, by the way. If you got one, you're not following this anyway to be honest, are you?
One last question. Last time you have to put your hands up.
Put your hands up if you gave yourself different marks for intelligence or creativity. Okay.
The reason I ask you this is, I think you're all wrong, by the way.
Obviously, apart from the two nines, obviously. Never argue with a nine is my view.
But the reason I say it is that I think most people operate on a very limited conception
of creativity and of intelligence.
So my question is, what were you thinking of when you gave yourself the mark?
When you decided you could give a number for creativity, what was in your mind?
When you give yourself a number for intelligence, what was it you were thinking of?
You see, my experience of it is that people operate on all kinds of misconceptions about creativity.
They think it's all about the arts. And while the arts are terribly important, it's not just about the arts.
They think it's about special people. It's really not. I mean, if you're a human being, it comes with a kit.
You are born with tremendous creative capacities.
The trouble is that creativity's a bit like literacy.
You may have an aptitude for it but never developed the abilities that are required to exercise it.
And that, to me, is a big fault of our education system.
And the third misconception is, there's nothing you can do about it. You're creative or not, and that's the end of it.
And I believe there's a great deal you can do to make yourselves more creative.
There was a very good program on the BBC. It was about how many people can live on Earth.
And they came to this view.
You know, there are now seven and a half billion people on the planet. And we don't know if the Earth can handle it.
So they said if everybody on Earth were to consume at the same rate as the average person in Rwanda -
- you know, consume food, fuel, water, ...
The Earth could sustain a maximum population of 15 billion people. So we're halfway to that.
The trouble, of course, is, we don't all consume at the same rate as they do in Rwanda.
They said if everybody on Earth were to consume at the same rate as the average person in North America,
the Earth could sustain a maximum population of 1.2 billion. So we're five times past that currently.
So if everybody on Earth wants to live as we do in North America -- and, by the way, they do --
we would need four more planets to make this feasible, which we don't have.
And there's a paradox here.
All of these challenges are created by human ingenuity and human innovation and creativity.
It's not the lemurs that are causing the problem. It's us.
And at the very point where we need to get even more innovative, more inventive, more ingenious
to deal with the challenges that we have created,
our education systems are stifling the very capacities on which we're about to depend.
I just want to get to this. We really live in two worlds, don't we?
There's a world that exists whether or not you exist,
a world that came into being before you did. It was here before you got here. It will be here well long after you're gone.
It's the world of other people, events, other circumstances.
Our education systems are pretty obsessed with that world.
But there's another world that exists only because you exist.
It's the world of your own private consciousness, the world that came into when you did,
the world, as somebody once said, where there's only one set of footprints.
A world of your private passions, your motivations, your aspirations, your hopes, and your talents.
And I believe the future of the world around us, so far as we're concerned, depends on understanding much more about the world within us.
And the more standardized our education systems become, the less amenable they are to allowing us to make those explorations.
You have no idea what your talents are, I'm sure.
So what I'm saying is if we're serious about exploring the world around us, we have to explore the world within us.
We are a very small part of all of this. The earth has been around for four and a half billion years.
Human beings like us, showed up -- I don't mean like neanderthal creatures.
I mean like groovy people like us, with attractive profiles and a sense of irony.
We showed up probably less than 100,000 years ago.
We are despoiling the very planet on which we depend.
We won't, I think, make a better job of it until we understand the depth of our own talent and spiritual resources within us.
When I ask you how intelligent you are, that's the wrong question.
The real question is how are you intelligent.
The question is not how creative are you; it's how are you creative.
If we can flip our education to get to a better sense of human capacity,
then I think we'll have a better chance of understanding and making sense of the world within us and the world around us.
There is a wonderful quote from H.G. Wells,
he said, "Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe."
Now, it may or may not be the case, but what we do know is that --
that the great bridge between the two worlds that we live in is education.
And I think that we have to rebuild it so we can build a bridge to the future, thank you very much.
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