Clarity Takes More Creativity than Cleverness

Clarity and cleverness together are magic.

Clarity Takes More Creativity than Cleverness

Clarity and cleverness together are magic.

I’m surrounded by creativity. I work with 19 co-workers, most of whom are creatives at heart. The clients we work with are often creative. My profession, in all of its forms, has creativity at its heart. Even things I enjoy doing, my quasi-hobbies, like writing and reading, are at least creative-adjacent.

When most of us think of creativity, we think of cleverness:

• The clever way a designer incorporated a meaningful shape into the logo's negative space.

• The clever way an artist depicted a deeper truth with simple tools.

• The clever advertising slogan that is so brilliant it sticks with you for weeks.

• The clever turn of phrase in a song.

But the hard work of creativity isn’t in the cleverness. It’s in the clarity.

It takes real skill to craft a message so brilliantly clear that it is almost obvious. Or creating a shape so simple yet so obviously true. The masters know that true genius isn't in what you add. It's in what you remove.

I’m preaching for the first time in, like, 5 years in front of a church this weekend. I’ve done some public speaking lately, but it’ll be the first time in quite a while doing what I used to do so often. I keep fighting myself to simplify. To distill what I feel I need to say down to its simplest essence.

Do I hope to be clever?
Sure, because if you can combine cleverness with clarity, you get real magic.

But the cleverness isn’t the most important part.
The clarity is.
And it takes way more creativity to be clear than to be clever.