Humanity Academy

Creativity Is Not Complicated But Here’s One Thing That Makes It Feel So

Gen AI can draft output, but meaning-making is still in you

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Gen AI made it easier to write things. Social media posts, emails, reports, articles, reviews… can all be done in an instant. But this also made it easier to skip the parts fuelling your creativity.

Things like: meaning-making, perspective, perception, preferences, tastes, your lifetime of experiences and learning, and so on.

With AI, you can generate a decent paragraph in seconds. You can outline an article, rephrase a quote or caption, or draft ten hooks plus 20 provocative headlines. And then… you close your laptop bit still feel foggy, stuck, inconsistent, confused.

That’s because the creativity part (and the writing with creativity part) is downstream. The bottleneck sits upstream. It sits further back in your ability to process your experiences, share your learning, tell your stories.

Humans don’t think in bullet points

We think in networks, and we think in stories. We’re hardwired for stories.

Whether you like it or not, your brain is constantly building mental models of what happened and telling stories about why it happened this way and not that way over there (accurate or not).

Those models take narrative form (e.g., stories we tell ourselves):

• this happened, then that happened
• here’s what it means about me
• here’s why they did it
• here’s the lesson
• here’s what I should do next

These can be powerful. And…dangerous. A good story clarifies, while a lazy story distorts. And many of us live on lazy stories because we rarely slow down long enough to examine them.

Examining them means thinking, reflecting, thinking some more. And, thinking takes up energy. Our brains already burn about 20% of our total energy intake. Thinking and reflecting adds to that load.

We may be hardwired for stories, but we’re also hardwired to Act.

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Perspective is the critical variable

Every story comes from a point of view, and many, many things shape our points of view. We choose:

• what to include and what to leave out
• who looks competent and who does not
• who seems unreasonable and who seems logical
• what counts as “the real issue” and what’s just folly

Then your brain loves to call the result of this “the truth.” End of Story.

Funnily enough, this is normal cognition. It’s also why people repeat the same patterns for years while swearing they’re learning. Also, why people continue to engage in habits and behaviours they know are destructive.

We are wired to prefer quick, instant results over long-term waiting (like spending now over saving for retirement).

But here’s the key cog in this story. Meaning-making and learning (along with Unlearning) deepens when you start asking:

• What did I ignore?
• What did I assume?
• What was I protecting?
• What story did I give myself?
• What story did I apply to the other person/people?

And, this is where creativity hides out and starts showing up in your life.

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Creativity isn’t “being artistic.”

Creativity is the capacity to generate options and choose better moves. At its root meaning (etymology), creativity means to bring into being.

That’s it.

And, thus, there are some excellent tools, tricks, and tips we can use to potentially bring different stories into being (than the ones we may habitually fall back on).

Better options can come from broader interpretations. A better interpretation comes from examining more perspectives.

Experience is at the heart of “learning”. The word experience originates from the Latin experientia (a trial, proof, experiment, or knowledge gained by practice).

The ex- part means “out of” and the *-per part has ancient origins, meaning “to test, risk.” Therefore, out of your testing and risking comes knowledge.

Yet, not all experience becomes learning (or knowledge) automatically. Most people treat experience like it’s self-teaching.

It’s not.

Experience is raw data. Unprocessed. Learning happens when we do the work of turning this input into meaning. Meaning-making.

When you don’t, you often carry:

• unresolved conversations
• repeating frustrations
• half-formed ideas
• emotional residue

This type of buzzing background noise steals creative bandwidth. It can also make your thinking brittle and limited. Stuck in certain story loops.

Creativity is fuelled by processing and reflecting on experiences, as that’s where:

• new combinations appear (synthesis)
• judgement and openness sharpen
• next steps don’t feel so random
• decisions get cleaner

Writing (and publishing) stories about the process of reflecting on experiences and reflecting on learning (and Unlearning) — can be wonderful to read. Plus, cathartic to write.

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Why Reflection Feels Complicated

“Reflect on your experience” is a vague instruction. And, vague instructions create vague results. Many folks just:

• write summaries
• perform insights
• avoid the real material
• quit because it feels pointless

Reflection becomes simpler when it’s structured around a few direct questions to reflect upon and write about, like:

• What happened? (facts, sequence, context)
• What’s the point? (why this matters, what it reveals)
• What am I missing? (blind spots, alternate explanations)
• What changes now? (one concrete adjustment)

Reflection feels hard when it stays floaty and fluffy. It feels easier when it forces contact with reality and instigates different potential storylines.

In my experience, and in my educational journey, the tool I’ve found most powerful for tying this together: A Learning Journal.

A Learning Journal is a running record of reflection. Plain version: it’s where you store the evidence of your thinking and reflection over time. Store your stories.

Capture small moments. Extract meaning and perspectives. Track patterns. Name what you’re learning, what you’re unlearning, and what you seek to learn. Decide (and track) what changes.

Two key outcomes follow:

1. It slows the pace of your reflection and thinking on experiences enough to see what’s happening. Speed hides patterns. Using a Learning Journal surfaces and reveals them.
2. It creates continuity and synthesis across time. You stop relying on memory and mood — as both are fallible and prone to glitching over time. With a Learning Journal, you build receipts.

This is where and why Learning Journals support creativity. They turn a life of background noise and convoluted stories into more consistent usable material — as well as accurate evidence of your to’ing and fro’ing life.

AI can’t do this for you. Gen AI can’t record your life and provide notes, like it does on Zoom calls.

AI can draft text. It can mimic a style. It can generate a story-shaped ro story-like explanation. But, AI can’t:

• feel those emotional signals telling you “this matters!”
• supply the bits and bytes of your lived experiences
• hold you accountable to unhealthy patterns across months
• choose a brave next move when the costs are real and potentially high

AI has no skin in the game when it comes to your life. But, you do. If you outsource meaning-making, perspective-shaping, taste-generating, preference-instigating, then you outsource your personal growth.

And, you most likely stifle your creative well.

A Minimal Learning Journal Habit (Use it Today)

You don’t need a “journaling habit.” You need a repeatable method. A Learning Journal is NOT “dear diary.”

Try this. It takes 7–10 minutes.

1) End-of-day snapshot (5 lines)

Write a compact account of a moment from today:

• a friction point
• a win
• a surprise
• a decision
• a conversation you can’t stop replaying

Keep these concrete.

2) Perspective shift (two lenses)

Answer each in one or two sentences:

• My lens: What was I assuming? What story was I telling?
• Another lens: What’s a plausible alternative explanation?

This tool breaks your autopilot. A version of this is in the illustration below (r*ead our earlier story* on using this approach).

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3) Meaning (one sentence)

Finish this line:

• “The lesson for me here might be…”

No essays. One sentence. Make it a working hypothesis. Try to stay open-minded.

4) Experiment (one action)

One small change for next time:

• a sentence you’ll say
• a boundary you’ll set
• a question you’ll ask
• a behaviour you intend to stop

If there’s no action, then nothing sticks.

5) Weekly second pass (10 minutes)

Once a week, scan your entries and write three sentences about:

1. What I’m learning
2. What I’m avoiding
3. What I’m changing

This is where the compounding happens. Patterns show up. Denial gets harder. Creativity will get fuelled — especially if you write and publish about these experiences.

The 7-day challenge

Do one entry a day for seven days using the protocol above. Then do a weekly second pass.

If you feel “too busy,” that’s important information, too. You’re living at a pace that makes insight unlikely — and increased creativity stalled.

If you want a guided system — with examples, prompts, and structure — we teach it inside our 3-module course **Learning Journals 101** at Humanity Academy.

Your creative life thrives when your thinking improves. Sure, Gen AI can help you write. But the meaning-making and making meaning is still on you.

This story was written by Dr. David Loewen, Co-founder of Humanity Academy. His doctoral research and dissertation were based on Learning Journals for personal and professional reflection.