Steve Jobs

When it comes to creativity, Steve Jobs comes to my mind. He was not only the co-founder of Apple, who invented the Mac computer and the smartphone as we know it, but he also came into deep critical thinking on how people could use technology in their daily lives. Products as the iPhone, iPad, and MacBook weren't just advances of communication sources of technology, but they were insightful solutions that combined design and function, shaping the way billions of people interact with the world.

His work highlights the importance of the creative process: creativity is not only about invention, but also about making connections between existing ideas. He once said, and I quote, "Creativity is just connecting things," or, in class, we mentioned connecting the dots. Jobs combined technology with art, science with intuition, and produced tools that felt personal, accessible, and revolutionary in the last century.

This insight connects to Jennifer Doudna's story in Walter Isaacson's The Code Breaker. Similar to Steve, who combined different fields to create our current technological products, Jennifer drew inspiration from nature itself. She and her collaborators didn't create CRISPR-Cas9 from scratch; They recognized a bacterial defense system and reimagined it as a tool to edit human DNA. Both Jobs and Doudna demonstrated that creativity often arises from seeing new possibilities in what already exists in our world.

These creative processes thrive on persistence, vision, and having the courage to ask What if? Whether it is in Silicon Valley or in a molecular biology lab. Both cases remind us that the simple idea of creativity doesn't rely on just one field but on a universal force to shape the way we live and what we can develop with it.