When I was in college, I took a Jazz History class during my last semester of my senior year. There were two reasons for this: I needed an extra humanities credit to graduate, and my friend told me it was an easy A.

As it turns out, it was an easy A, which was nice because it was my last semester and I didn't really feel like working too hard, and I also was taking some harder classes so it was nice to have a balance. Just because it was easy, though, didn't mean that I didn't learn anything. I gained a deeper understanding of Jazz and its many musical depths, a genre of which I did not have much prior knowledge. Our professor also told us a little rule of creativity that I continue to remember to this day.

Let me first talk about Jazz for a little bit. It's not my favorite genre (classic rock is), but I can appreciate it as an art form. I can also appreciate how it was more or less the original rock 'n roll. From its rise to popularity in the 1920s, Jazz was met with some opposition from more classically minded musicians, who made the case that the "wild" and "unstructured" nature of it was detrimental to music as a whole. It was, in many ways, the "party music" of the era. Interestingly, nowadays Jazz has the reputation of being a more "refined" music, and you may hear it when you walk into a restaurant or bar that is going for a "classy" ambiance. This makes me wonder if 80 years from now Katy Perry's music will be thought of as refined and cultured...and that thought terrifies me.

But back to creativity. It's something that pretty much everyone wishes they had more of. Major corporations are very interested in ways that they can get their workforce to be more creative. Why is it so desirable? Sure, everyone would like to come up with the next big idea that makes them millions of dollars, but even if you did, would you act on it? I heard one time that the average person has 5 ideas a day, any of which could make them a millionaire if they just acted on them. I find that a little hard to believe, but it is certainly motivating.

I think that people more or less enjoy the idea of creativity. They want to think of themselves as creative because they admire other creative people, and want to be admired themselves. There is nothing wrong with this, it is certainly good to have creative people in the world, but it is important to not get too carried away.

Now to what my Jazz History professor taught me. He said that creativity is basically broken down into three key things, which I call "The Creativity Triad." The three points of the triad are imitate, emulate, and innovate. I think that "creativity ladder" might be a better term, because I assert they must be done sequentially, but it's just an analogy so let's not get too nit picky about it.

So the way it is drawn, you can think of it as a pyramid as well, with imitation and emulation being the strong base, and innovation being the "high point." Let's break down each term.

Imitate: They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (although teachers never really bought that excuse when they called you out for plagiarizing stuff, but I digress). It's usually brushed aside in the adult world, and most wouldn't consider it "creative" at all. I mean, how can something be creative if you are just completely copying what someone else has already done? I assert that it is indeed creative to imitate the works of others, and also an important part of the learning process. Take, for example, learning to play a musical instrument (something which most people consider a creative thing to do). When you start to learn, you don't immediately compose ground-breaking symphonies with structures and rhythms previously unheard of, do you? Probably not. Instead, you learn to play songs that other people have already written.

While imitation on its own isn't inherently creative, it is nonetheless a necessary part of the creative process. Creativity usually involves "breaking the rules," but you can't break the rules until you have a solid understanding of them, and why they became rules in the first place. If you want an example, think of someone who tries to dress in a "fashion forward" way by breaking the rules of fashion without really knowing why they were rules in the first place (*cough* hipsters *cough*), they probably look like a goofball.

So whenever you find yourself imitating something or someone, don't feel bad about yourself, but also realize why you are doing it.

Emulate: To me, this is the most common and also the most import one. Emulation basically means that you are taking something that is already established, and tweaking it a little bit (or maybe a lot). There are tons of benefits to this. You still get a bit of satisfaction from doing something kind of original, but without the hassle of fabricating something out of thin air. From a management perspective, it is also less risky to emulate because you are basing an idea or design off something that is already proven. Purely new ideas tend to take several iterations of testing before they are "just right," so slightly modifying an existing idea should, in theory, be less difficult to achieve.

Emulation is found throughout creative processes, and one good example is in the field of cooking. Look at pretty much any recipe, there is a good chance there are other recipes for the same dish that more or less follow the same guidelines. They may use slightly different ingredients, they may use slightly different cooking times or temperatures, but the overall framework is there. This knowledge can turn you into a pretty good cook really quickly. You don't have to memorize a bunch of recipes, you just have to learn a few techniques and then look for those reoccurring themes in different dishes.

There is a bit of a dispute on where imitation ends and where emulation begins. Technically, as long as you don't copy something verbatim, it "counts" as emulation, but most would argue that changing just one or two little things doesn't really constitute something as your own. In any case, emulation is the second stage in the creative process, and another necessary component. In fact, you could really spend your entire life imitating and emulating things and be considered quite creative.

Innovate: This is the one that everybody wants to be, and what most people would consider "creative." It basically entails fabricating and idea completely out of thin air that is truly original. Now, it is hard for me to say if purely original thought really exists. Sure, people in history have been considered "innovators," but were they really? They had good ideas, but were those ideas really thought up in a vacuum, or were they extensions of other things that were already established? It is very hard to say. At the current moment, we have had thousands of years of people and ideas that came before us, are you really sure that your idea is purely original?

Take, for example, the smartphone. Pretty innovative right? Well, kinda. I mean, before the smartphone we had cell phones that could crudely access the internet, take pictures, etc. It basically just corralled all the things we wanted to do "on the go" and put them into one device. But the cell phone was pretty innovative, right? I mean, it was just a more convenient version of the telephone, which had existed for about a century prior. The real innovation with cell phones was constructing the cell networks that could handle the high volume of phone traffic, and that was more or less an extension of the technology that had existed for two-way radios for a few decades. But the telephone, now that was innovative. Well, it was pretty much an extension of the telegraph system. Telegraph? An extension of optical signaling methods (such as smoke and light signals) that have existed since ancient times. So really, most "innovative" technologies are more or less a result of slight advances to preceding technologies across the course of human history.

My point with all this is to not get too caught up with trying to be ground-breaking with your thoughts and ideas. Start by copying, then experimenting with slight changes, and finally see if you can really think outside the box. Necessity is the key to invention, so basing your idea off of a need isn't completely innovative, but it is what we have been doing for thousands of years, and I think it has worked out pretty well. Creativity isn't just thinking of something new, it also lies in taking a bunch of different old stuff and putting it together in a new way.