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that lack of fear manifested itself as a do-it-yourself attitude. If the washing machine broke, you didn’t call a repair person. Instead you walked over to the washer, took it apart, and tried to fix it. That was part of the deal—in our house you were believed to be capable of fixing things.

      Of course, sometimes home improvement jobs went awry. Once, we disassembled the family piano to see how it worked. Partway through the process, however, we realized that putting it back together wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as taking it apart. What was once a musical instrument became more like a series of art objects. The giant harp-like array of strings from that piano is still leaning up against one wall of our former bedroom in the basement, and the beautiful assembly of eighty-eight wooden hammers is mounted today on a wall in David’s studio.

      Artistic license was tolerated as well. You could take a perfectly good red bicycle you’d gotten for your birthday, sandblast it the next day, and repaint it neon green, just to make it more interesting—without a word of recrimination.

      We didn’t know as children that we were creative. We just knew that it was okay for us to try experiments that sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed. That we could keep creating, keep tinkering, and trust that something interesting would result if we just stuck with it.

      David’s best friend in the third grade, Brian, had a different experience with creativity.

      One day, David and Brian were in art class, sitting at a table with half a dozen classmates. Brian was working on a sculpture, making a horse out of the clay that the teacher kept under the sink. Suddenly one of the girls saw what he was making, leaned over, and said to him, “That’s terrible. That doesn’t look anything like a horse.” Brian’s shoulders sank. Dejected, he wadded up the clay horse and threw it back in the bin. David never saw Brian attempt a creative project again.

      How often does something like that happen in childhood? Whenever we mention lost-confidence stories like Brian’s to business audiences, someone always comes up to us afterward to share a similar experience when a teacher or parent or peer shut them down. Let’s face it, kids can be cruel to one another. Sometimes, people remember a specific moment when they decided, as children, that they weren’t creative. Rather than be judged, they simply withdrew. They stopped thinking of themselves as creative at all.

      Author and researcher Brené Brown, who has interviewed scores of people about their experiences with shame, found that one third of them could recall a “creativity scar,” a specific incident when they were told they weren’t talented as artists, musicians, writers, singers.

      When a child loses confidence in his or her creativity, the impact can be profound. People start to separate the world into those who are creative and those who are not. They come to see these categories as fixed, forgetting that they too once loved to draw and tell imaginative stories. Too often they opt out of being creative.

      The tendency to label ourselves as “noncreative” comes from more than just our fear of being judged. As schools cut funding for the arts and high-stakes testing becomes more pervasive, creativity itself is devalued, compared to traditional core subjects like math and science. Those subjects emphasize ways of thinking and problem solving that have a clear-cut single right answer, while many real-world twenty-first-century challenges require more open-minded approaches. Well-meaning teachers and parents play a part when counseling young people toward conventional professions, sending the subtle message that occupations involving creativity are too risky and out of the mainstream. We both know what that feels like. Our guidance counselors told us when we were graduating from high school that we should stay near Akron, Ohio, and work for the local tire companies. They thought we were “dreamers” for setting our sights beyond the familiar. Had we taken their advice, there would be no IDEO or d.school today.

      Too often they opt out of being creative.

      Education expert Sir Ken Robinson claims that traditional schooling destroys creativity. “We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make,” he says. “Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn.”

      Teachers, parents, business leaders, and role models of all kinds have the power either to support or suppress creative confidence in those around them. At the right age, a single cutting remark is sometimes enough to bring our creative pursuits to a standstill. Fortunately, many of us are resilient enough to try again.

      Sir Ken told us a memorable story about talent that almost went to waste. He was born in Liverpool and made a discovery one day while talking to fellow Liverpudlian Paul McCartney. Apparently, the legendary singer-songwriter had not done especially well in his musical studies. His high school music teacher had neither given McCartney good marks nor identified any particular musical talent in him.

      George Harrison had the same teacher and had likewise failed to attract any positive attention in music class. “Let me get this straight,” Sir Ken asked McCartney in amazement, “this teacher had half of the Beatles in his classes and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary!?” Lacking encouragement from the person best positioned to nurture their musical talents, McCartney and Harrison could have “played it safe” and gone to work in Liverpool’s traditional manufacturing and shipping industries. But that “safe” route would have put them in the center of a downward economic spiral. Liverpool’s heavy industry declined precipitously in the following two decades, leading to dizzying unemployment in their hometown and eventually to the closing of the school they had attended, the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys. Luckily for music fans, McCartney and his friends John, George, and Ringo found encouragement elsewhere. And of course, the Beatles became one of the most successful and beloved groups of all time.

      Much later, having achieved fame and fortune and been knighted by the queen, Sir Paul McCartney felt the noblesse oblige to help others get the creative chance he nearly missed. After the Liverpool Institute closed, putting his music teacher—and all the other faculty and staff—out of a job, McCartney helped restore the dilapidated nineteenth-century school building from the ground up. Together with educator Mark Featherstone-Witty, he formed the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, a thriving creative environment that helps young people with emerging talent build practical skills in music, acting, and dance.

       LET GO OF COMPARISON

      It takes courage to leave the land of certain outcomes and the comfort of what we know to try a new approach or share a wild-sounding idea. In her research on insecurity, Brené Brown talked with a thousand people to identify what makes them feel inadequate and to understand the downward spirals of feeling “not good enough.” As Brown writes: “When our self-worth isn’t on the line, we are far more willing to be courageous and risk sharing our raw talents and gifts.” One way to embrace creativity, Brown says, is to let go of comparison. If you are concerned about conforming or about how you measure up to others’ successes, you won’t perform the risk taking and trailblazing inherent in creative endeavors.

      Over the years, we’ve noticed from teams we’ve worked with that when people are insecure, they’re not at their best. If they don’t feel like they have the respect of their peers or their boss, they try to boost themselves through self-promotion. Instead of focusing on their work and feeling good about what they produce, they get sidetracked worrying about what other people think.

      Once that insecurity takes hold, it can create a vicious circle. So whether you work alone or with a team, try hard to disarm it at the earliest opportunity. Give other people credit when it’s due. Pay attention to signs that someone around you is feeling undervalued or has lost his or her self-confidence. Have that difficult conversation with the people around you to air out the issue. Because when you don’t address insecurity, it’s like the family secret that everyone knows but no one talks about. The conversation may be uncomfortable and painful but is often worthwhile in the long run.

      We’ve seen the pattern dozens of times at IDEO where new employees are

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