Since I haven't been traveling a lot the last 3 months, its given me a chance to do some creative stuff, like cooking, decorating my apartment etc. Now first and foremost, I am by no means any good in either of these, but I'd like to be good and am working towards that. I have gotten a lot better than I was 3 months ago, thanks to watching hours of HGTV and food channel.
In general, I would like to think of myself as being creative. Creative not in the sense that I can cook amazing dishes or paint. But creative in the sense that I often times can think of things to do which are in general different from what others would think of doing. However, after carefully thinking on the topic of creativity, I am convinced that what separates very creative people from the rest is attention to detail. I have to admit, I suck at it. Here is why I think so. If you were to watch any creative program (redoing you home or a cooking show, architectural show..anything) often times its the minute details, things I wouldn't even think about which would make the big difference. In my mind its analogous to the difference in the print quality of a 8X10 picture printed out of a 640X480 image and a 8X10 picture printed out of a 5000X4000 image. They both probably tell the same story and show the same thing, yet the latter does it much better than the former.
I hate gender based generalizations, which say men are like this and women are like that etc., for the same reason I hate it when people say "Men can never understand women". I truly believe every person is different and has a different story to tell. Which is why generalizations typically don't work. Men will never understand women. But I believe if they listen well enough, they can understand "a woman". And when they meet another woman, its a totally different story and they have to start from scratch again. I have not, in my whole life met 2 women who are very similar. But before I digress too much, where I was going with this was that, One safe gender based generalization I think I can make is that, women are much better at paying attention to detail than men are. You put randomly selected, 100 men and 100 women in a room, and I could bet my next paycheck that the cumulative creative genius of the women will be more than that of the men. Sure many would argue that there are more men in creative positions like architecture and cooking etc., than women. However that ignores the fact that only a fraction of women compared to men work, hence I would say that is an invalid argument. Also I am talking about average people here, not professionally educated people.
Another thing that proves my point is that women are much better at remembering anniversaries, birthdays etc., and all finer details men typically tend to forget.
Bottomline...In a nutshell, I am saying
1) Overall quality of creative genius greatly depends on a person's ability to sense finer details in any form of art. This ability enables the person to adjust and improve the finer details thus creating an overall better experience for people enjoying the art.
2) Women (IMO) tend to be much better at scanning and figuring out the finer details than men.
3) Therefore all other things being equal, women tend to be better at creating, capturing and refining art.
No, I am not sexist. No I am not trying to get Brownie points from women for this post. These are merely my observations based on the experience of working with and having friends, among men and women. Truth be told, I only know a handful of women well and they all exhibit the characteristics I mentioned above. If you disagree with me, let me know.
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