Here's the video of my latest TEDx:

and this is the original script I made:

Creativity is a Skill, Not a Gift‍

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
— Albert Einstein

Let’s look at the following drawing, can you guess the image? 

[Show slide with a picture of a Dog]

Easy right? it’s a dog. The drawing is not perfect, is not symmetrical, not even colored properly. But it gives a message.

What if I told you that when you were five years old, you were a creative genius? Not just you, but almost every single one of us in this room.

There’s a famous study by George Land, a scientist who developed a creativity test for NASA to identify the most innovative minds for space exploration. He decided to run the same test on a group of kindergarteners, around five-year-olds. The results? 98% of them scored at a genius level in divergent thinking.

That means at one point, we all had the ability to see endless possibilities, connect ideas in new ways, and create without hesitation.

But here’s where it gets interesting. George Land didn’t stop there. He tested the same kids again at age 10. Their creative genius? Dropped to 30%. At age 15? 12%. And by adulthood? Only 2%.

So, what happened? How did we go from nearly all of us being creative geniuses to almost none of us?

The answer is simple: we learned to fear being wrong.

As children, we don’t hesitate to draw, build, invent, or tell stories—because we don’t care if they’re perfect. We don’t even care if they make sense! But as we grow older, we become more aware of rules, expectations, and judgments.

In fact, studies show that creative thinkers, people who have learned to embrace uncertainty and make unexpected connections, are more successful in business, problem-solving, and even personal relationships. A report by the World Economic Forum ranked creativity as one of the top three most valuable skills for the future workforce.

And yet, most of us have let it fade.

But what if we could get it back? What if creativity wasn’t just for artists or entrepreneurs—but for all of us?

The good news is: we can retrain our minds to think creatively again. We can re-learn the skills we unknowingly abandoned, if we’re willing to step outside our comfort zones and let go of our fear of failure.

So today, I want to help you do just that. Because creativity isn’t just about art, music, or design, it’s about seeing the world differently, solving problems in new ways, and reclaiming the genius we all once had.

We live in a world that labels people. "You are creative," they say to the artist. "You are logical," they say to the engineer. "You are analytical," they say to the accountant. But what if I told you that creativity is not a gift reserved for the lucky few? What if I told you it’s a skill, like learning a new language, cooking, or even riding a bike?

I’m Carlos, a software engineer and senior product designer based in Tokyo, and I’ve dedicated my life to building and growing digital experiences. I’m full of tattoos as a way to express myself and tell my stories. Just like a living painting.

Now, my story started in a place where creativity was a luxury I didn’t think I could afford.

I grew up in Costa Rica, a small country in Central America, surrounded by endless blue skies and sunshine. With the most lovely and supportive family. But as in many countries, society encourages you to pick up a good-paying career. We’re taught from a young age to follow the correct path, to color inside the lines.

Being creative was for the dreamers without a job. In school, I was excellent at math, but I loved drawing. I loved technology, but I also wanted to tell stories. Society told me I had to choose. What if creativity and logic could coexist? That question left me feeling lost for years. I decided to start my career as a software engineer and I was always adding a bit of creativity in work. People loved it.

And then, in my early twenties, I lost my mother to cancer. That person you care about the most vanishes in front of you. I felt like a part of me died that day.

That moment changed everything.

Grief has a way of stripping you down to the core. It forces you to ask the big questions: What do I really have to lose? What am I here for? What do I want to create? How do I want to be remembered? And that’s how I started my journey. 

When you have nothing to lose, you take bigger risks.

I moved to Asia, and started in China where I spent seven years, learning and growing as a man. Feeling lost time after time, but knowing somehow, that it was a good decision.

Then, moving to Japan, I became fascinated with its culture of discipline, structure, and work ethic. But I also saw something heartbreaking. People who had given up on their creativity. Who had accepted that their lives should be linear: study hard, get a job, work late, repeat.

Does this sound familiar?

But let’s go back to Einstein’s fish. What if your genius isn’t on the standard path? What if your genius is in writing, or designing, or storytelling, or simply seeing the world differently?

The truth is, that creativity is beaten out of us. Not intentionally. But slowly, systematically. The system rewards people who follow the rules. But creativity thrives in exploration, and, most importantly, failure.

That’s why I wear my tattoos with pride, they are my story made visible. Each one is a mark of who I am, of the failures that shaped me, the risks I took, and the moments of triumph. In a world that often asks us to conform, my tattoos remind me that I have chosen to live creatively, to embrace the unexpected, and to wear my heart, quite literally, on my skin.

Because creativity isn’t just about what we make, it’s about how we live. It’s in the willingness to be seen as we truly are, unfiltered, imperfect, and unafraid.

What is creativity: Creativity is putting things together in a new way to solve a problem, express an idea, or make something unique.

It’s not just about painting or music, it’s in everyday life.

• When you put ingredients together to cook a meal? That’s creativity.
• When you find a shortcut to work? That’s creativity.
• When you turn a mistake into something useful? That’s creativity.

It’s not about being artistic. It’s about taking what you know and mixing it with imagination to create something different.

If you can think, you can be creative. Because creativity isn’t magic. It’s neuroscience.

Studies show that creativity is built on three things:

1. Resilience: The ability to keep going even when your ideas don’t work. 
2. Exploration: The willingness to learn from different fields, cultures, and experiences. 
3. Failure: Letting go of fear and embracing failure. 

The good news? These are all trainable skills.

When you move across the world, loneliness becomes your greatest teacher.

As a Latino, full of tattoos, in Japan, I often found myself the only one in the room who looked like me, thought like me, worked like me. At first, that isolation felt heavy, like I didn’t belong, like I had been shattered into pieces, scattered in a place where nothing quite fit.

But here’s the thing about broken pieces: when they come back together, they form something new.

And that’s what creativity is.

Creativity isn’t about perfection, it’s about taking what’s broken, what’s disconnected, what’s out of place, and reshaping it into something meaningful.

In that loneliness, I learned something powerful: Creativity is born from discomfort.

When you’re in a new place, when the familiar is stripped away, your brain has no choice but to make new connections. You start seeing patterns where there were none before. You start connecting dots that once seemed unrelated.

And that’s where innovation happens.

Think about it: Some of the most creative breakthroughs in history didn’t come from people sitting comfortably in what they already knew. They came from outsiders, from people who had to piece together new ways of thinking.

So how do we rebuild the creativity that was trained out of us? Here are a few ways:

1. Write things down. Write down every idea, even bad ones. By hand, not digitally. You don’t understand how much the brains reorganize when you write up things.
2. Expose yourself to different fields. Read something outside your expertise. Talk to people in other industries. What I love about my job as a software engineer and designer, is that I need to keep learning about new fields.
3. Embrace failure. Treat every failed idea as an experiment, not a mistake. I consider myself successful because I have failed more than the average person has ever tried.
4. Change your routine. Take a different route to work, eat something new, listen to a new type of music.
5. Ask better questions. Instead of "Can I do this?" ask "How can I do this?", instead “Why?” ask yourself “Why not?”

A study conducted last year, at a Japanese national university, found something fascinating. Students who stepped outside their academic comfort zones, who mixed different fields of study, gained a deeper understanding of global challenges. They weren’t just learning, they were learning how to think differently.

So why does this matter to you?

Because in Japan, we are trained to specialize. We’re told to focus, to master one thing. But as this research, and history, shows, creativity thrives at the intersection of different ideas.

If you’re feeling stuck in your career, if you’re looking for fresh ideas, maybe the answer isn’t working harder at the same thing. Maybe it’s stepping into a completely different world.

So, don’t just study. Don’t just work. Explore. Learn something unexpected. Pick up an instrument. Read about physics. Take a class in something wildly unrelated to your field. Because the next breakthrough in your career might come from a place you never expected.

Creativity is not a gift. It’s not some divine lightning bolt. It’s a skill, a survival skill. And skills can be learned.

So the next time someone tells you they’re not creative, remind them: Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

Don’t let yourself be that fish. Japan, a beautiful country known for its craftsmanship, precision, and technological advancements, yet struggling with fostering new ideas

Go make something. Design something. Write something. Build something. Because the world needs your ideas. 

And that, my friends, is what creativity is really about.

Thank you.

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