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Once we get past the irony of creativity self-help manuals promising us that we, too, can become creative gurus by following 5 easy steps, we can begin to see the underlying cultural importance of such works. Micki McGee, author of Self Help Inc., Makeover Culture in American Life, notes that up to one-half of all Americans have purchased a self-help book in their lifetimes. What’s more impressive however, is that the most popular category of self-help literature is not, as one may assume, relationship or coping advice but rather, self-improvement which increasingly features texts on enhancing creativity. It appears as though being creative is a valuable asset in our modern society – but why?

Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs would answer this question by noting that creativity, or self-actualization, is often regarded as the highest form of human achievement. Robert Weiner would perhaps, add that the demise of the traditional job and family is also causing us to search for new ways to thrive, survive, or even make sense of our new realities. Therefore, in a society where innovation has come to be highly valued both economically and socially, it makes sense that the creative mind is desirable. So, how do the do-it-yourself creativity manuals help us get creative?

The early American ancestors of the modern self-help manual were the jurisprudence books, which initially gained popular traction around the late-17th Century. These books helped individuals pursue their own rights in the court of law and establish themselves within a greater societal context. Today, the majority of the self-help books – specifically those focusing on creativity – place the individual as the center of gravity. This shift is interesting and surely appeals to a highly individualistic culture yet, it also appears to go against the grain of some of the emergent scholarly research on creativity.

The ever-growing body of academic research on creativity seems to tell us that the endeavor is best characterized as a collective effort; the result of intricate networks of influence and cultural and contextual interactions. Keith Sawyer distinguishes between little ‘c’ creativity, (the result of novel ways of doing individual, everyday activities) and big ‘C’ Creativity, (the socially experienced and useful innovations). When we think of breakthrough products or great pieces of music, we are usually referring to big ‘C’ Creativity; however, the vast majority of popularized self-help creativity manuals encourage us to believe that similar creative results are best pursued alone.

Could it be that the popularized, self-centered perspective on creativity promotes a misguided view of the process? On the one hand, creativity manuals do encourage us to think about new possibilities and to attempt to future-proof ourselves. Moreover, certain types of creative problem-solving do depend upon individuals and can be enhanced by developing specific skills.

On the other hand, popular self-help manuals tend to focus disproportionately on the role of the creative individual and by extension, assign all of the success and failure to the reader. In our modern reality, the situations where we function completely autonomously are few and far in-between, which means that being a successful ‘creative’ increasingly requires the ability of social navigation.  In addition, self-help manuals encourage us all to become innovators by following more or less the same strategies and in a sense, advocate for a new standard, where everyone is creative – or at least thinks in the same ‘divergent’ way.

Understanding the role of creativity in our lives is important on the personal and professional fronts. While there is no question that do-it-yourself creativity manuals are popular with their patients, there ought to be some questions raised about the types of self-medication they offer.