Going From Creative to Intellectual Intelligence

Humans are more naturally interested in relatable subjects … such as art, games, music, and dancing. These entertaining activities are foundational to what makes life enjoyable. They are easily relatable to children because all children can engage and immediately appreciate the value of “The Arts”. No teacher is required to explain why we listen to music or how to enjoy cheering on a local sports team. Humans have been dancing and painting together for thousands of years...long before the modern day concepts of “school” or “teacher” had meaning.

The Arts are very important to living a full and happy life and growing meaningful relationships. But in and of themselves The Arts can be a challenging place to make a living. This is in part because these activities are so naturally enjoyable. Another is that anyone can learn to do them … which is why they are so “relatable” … a key driver of what makes The Arts so much fun! At WEquil.School we encourage kids to use their natural love of The Arts to get really good at writing, speaking, and creating projects. By doing this they become more confident … and this is how we bridge the gap and help them develop creative intelligence.

Learning how to leverage your natural interests in these things to add value is extremely useful. But how can you start to cultivate your interests into things that are harder such as STEM? How can you grow your curiosity in the transition period from Creative Intelligence to Intellectual intelligence?

First, what is Creative and Intellectual Intelligence? Creative Intelligence is the ability to take things that are naturally very interesting and turn them into projects that add value to others. There is an abundance of young people interested in games, creating artwork, and other more creative interests, but not very many of them take the step to share their work with others and take the things that they already enjoy creating and make them into projects that add value. As you can see Creative Intelligence is very important, and is an easy way for young people to start sharing their work with others since the projects are based on their interests.

Intellectual Intelligence is expanding your curiosity into harder subjects that give you a better understanding of how the world works. This will include STEM, and other more hard hitting subjects such as economics, finance and accounting, that require a certain amount of knowledge to get started. This is also a very important pillar to help you grow your understanding of the world, and also because the barrier to entry for these fields is a lot higher because not everyone can start doing things within these fields without some research.

Obviously Intellectual Intelligence is a lot harder to cultivate as many of these subjects are not as naturally interesting. However, it is essential for learning about the world around you, so how can you transition from creative intelligence to intellectual intelligence?

First, I want to mention that transitioning from creative to intellectual intelligence does not mean that you stop creating projects about more naturally interesting things. In fact it is the opposite! It means broadening your interests to other things as well as integrating more subjects within Intellectual Intelligence into your projects within creative intelligence. For example, using software programming to create digital art, or using statistics to evaluate different types of art, and writing a thesis a