Someone in my mastermind group told me recently that they aren’t creative.

This is someone who runs their own business. They write a newsletter. They design the products they sell. They’ve built the systems the whole operation runs on.

I hear versions of this all the time. Parents of students applying to art school often tell me their kid is the only creative one in the family, and they don’t know where it comes from. Entrepreneurs building businesses describe content they make as "marketing" or client acquisition. Working artists and designers separate their “real” creative work from everything that supports it like project management and research.

Each of them is doing creative work and calling it something else.

Where else creativity shows up

When you picture someone doing creative work, who comes to mind?

A painter at an easel. A novelist. A filmmaker. Those are familiar images, and the creativity in them is easy to recognize.

The picture can hold more than that.

Think about someone designing a workshop, developing a product, or creating a way for people to work together. They have something they want to make possible, but its form and the results it will produce are still partly unknown. Some of what they need to understand will emerge through making it.

The same is true of writing a newsletter. You can have a familiar process and still begin with an idea whose meaning you haven’t fully worked out. Choosing the words and finding the connections produces something you couldn’t entirely see at the start.

The everyday names for this work hide that. A newsletter becomes marketing. A product becomes inventory. A system becomes admin. Look at what someone is bringing into being, and what they have to discover along the way, and the picture opens up.

I’ve been slow to recognize some of that work in my own life.

A stack of envelopes

Right out of college, I worked in the Reuters photography department during the Olympic Games in Atlanta. As a new hire, I got one of the least glamorous jobs in the building. Returning unused negatives to the photographers who shot them.

The negatives came to me in a pile of envelopes with photographers’ names scribbled on the front. There was no system for organizing them. When a photographer came to collect their work, we’d dig through the giant piles together, looking for envelopes with their name on them and hoping we’d found everything.

I could have kept digging through the piles with each photographer. Instead, I reorganized everything by photographer and rearranged the space into something resembling a farmer's market booth. Someone would walk up, give me their name, and I’d hand over all of their negatives that weren't sent over the wire.

The photographers were grateful. Those negatives were work they could sell to stock agencies, and now they could walk away with all of it.

I didn’t think of any of it as creative. I was surrounded by photographers whose work was being published across the globe, and I was sorting envelopes.

Looking back though, it was a creative design project. I had noticed a problem, imagined a different way of handling it, and designed a system that put it to work in service of others.

Your own stack of envelopes

When we overlook the creativity inherent in our work, it’s easy to expect ourselves to know the steps ahead of time and anticipate the results. An idea or approach that needs reworking can feel like something we should have figured out already.

Seeing the work more clearly makes room for what we can only learn by making it. We can bring care, skill, and an intention we believe in, then let what happens inform the next decision.

Somewhere in your week, you might find your own stack of envelopes. Something that you’ve been counting as just another task but probably has more creative potential than you realize.

Try and explore that potential and see where it takes you.

Until next week, may you notice creativity in unexpected places.

Jeff