Is Resourcefulness the Most Underrated Form of Creativity?
When I’m in a new space I love to play the game “How many people can we sleep here?” This queen bed? Four people, in a pinch. This living room floor? Definitely eight. The love seat? Perfect for three people who sleep sitting up. I inherited this “sleep calculator” from my Irish family, a DNA adaptation honed over centuries of large families and small spaces. While my mother and I should never be left loose on an Airbnb listing, I cherish the make-it-work spirit we inherited from the strong Irish women propping up our family tree. Ingenious thinkers who picked pine cones as fire starters and who sent kids to school with a hot baked potato in lieu of lunch boxes and gloves. Yet, I often wonder if they would have ever considered themselves creative?
Resourcefulness has to be the most underrated form of creativity. Looking at a hot potato and seeing a glove is definitely the act of creating something new and valuable (aka creativity), yet I’d wager these Bridgets never uttered the labels “creative” or “innovative,” they would not have verified these skills on LinkedIn, or down at the pub either. They were simply doing what they had to, to survive. All the reasons that made these women ingenious were the same reasons their ingenuity was overlooked. They came from a working-class community, with less: less money, less time, less space, and less influence. Perhaps the other reason resourcefulness is not seen as the height of creativity is because it is not a choice, but rather a skill employed under duress. When the pleasure disappears so too does the creative label. Stretching a ham bone to feed eight doesn’t have the same creative ring as a Sunday afternoon spent with the oil paints.
Resourcefulness Is a Master Class in Creativity
Regardless of the reasons, resourcefulness is creativity’s poor cousin, yet it’s a master class in its most important skills: problem identification and escaping existing thought patterns. Skills that atrophy in places of more abundance. Which is a wasted opportunity for creativity but also for curtailing our obsession with MORE. We tend to think the key to success is always more: more money, more time, and bigger budgets, which can have us chasing the wrong things at the expense of more creative thinking. In his provocative book Stretch, Scott Sonenshein highlights how people and organizations approach resources in two different ways: “chasing” and “stretching.” “When chasing, we exhaust ourselves in the pursuit of more. When stretching, we embrace the resources we already have.” Counterintuitively, resourcefulness, or “stretching,” actually frees us to think more creatively, because it forces that mega-skill behind great ideas: being able to escape your thought patterns and look at your subject in a new light. When you are being resourceful you HAVE to think differently because the usual way is not available to you.
A perfect encapsulation of resourcefulness leading to better ideas because it forces a new approach is DeepSeek. At the time of this writing, DeepSeek is a Chinese upstart sending shock waves through Silicon Valley. Like the powerhouse Bridgets in my family tree, the Chinese AI start-up was dealing with a limited access problem; not to gloves but to cutting-edge semiconductors. This was because of Washington’s ban on chip exports to China. They had to get resourceful. They had to “stretch.” Their solution? Rather than searching its whole knowledge base, like “a librarian who has read all the books in the library,” DeepSeek only activates the necessary portions of its system to “hunt out the right book,” cutting down on time and energy. A breakthrough shortcut that is upending the business model of AI. Meta announced it would spend $65 billion on AI in 2025; Deep Seek claimed it trained its model with just $5.6 million.
How Can We Bring More Resourcefulness into Our Thinking?
First of all, always have a problem. You’ll also never find a resourceful person working without one, yet I’ve encountered many a company so awash in resources (and the politics that go with such abundance)that they’re no longer chasing problems but whims. Second, a new constraint may be the best addition for your next project. What if you could only achieve your goals with what you already have? Is there untapped value sitting right in front of you?
And last but not least, when we’re looking for creative problem solvers, don’t discount the resourceful, even if they may have discounted themselves. A busy mom who’s invented three new educational hacks by noon, or the teenager who’s repurposing Goodwill into haute couture may be your next creative powerhouse
There aren’t awards for resourcefulness. There should be. To the person from my Fred Meyer parking lot who hot glued a beauty hand mirror to your broken side-view mirror, I salute you. And award you the Grand Prix.
Sources:
Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less & Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined