More personal thoughts on creativity -- subtracting to add

Creative thinking -- along with a willingness to take risks -- has often been my differentiator in the working world.  But these attributes are much more than factors that might land me a job over a similarly qualified candidate, or help me find a new way of designing a program or project.  They also give me pride, satisfaction, and an overall feeling of well-being and purpose. 

After two years of national service as an AmeriCorps*VISTA, I took the risk of leaving the comfy non-profit world (and climate) of San Diego, CA and relocated back east to become a journalist in New York.  The confidence I gained from working hard to become a professional writer for BusinessWeek -- really learning one aspect of the craft of writing -- was something that paved my way to an even more purely creative pursuit:  sculpting (sometimes known as stone carving), something I do for its own sake.

The connection?  Both are "subtractive" for me in a very particular sense.  Here's what I mean (and let me know if you have a similar process):  my method of writing has long been to throw it all into one document – all the data, the quotes, the rambling attempts at annotated biographies – and then proceed to whittle it down. To carve it, you might way. Stone carving, it follows naturally, is also a subtractive art form.  You use a chisel or rasp to help discover the form already hidden within the stone. 

What I've found is that reducing a mass of matter or words can often "add" more nuance and character than actually adding to it, that you can actually complete a creative endeavor by removing or destroying.  And further, the beauty of seeing a work emerge from an otherwise untended, unharnessed, unsmoothed, unpolished mass of rawness can be supremely satisfying.

Here are some photos of my second work of stone carving (I'm definitely a novice so don't judge me too harshly):

The early stage: 

And now: 

I'm sure this is the same in business, especially in web (and probably often in process and product design), where a stripped-down version can actually function much better than its more decked-out counterpart.  A good example that comes to mind is 1) The Google homepage,

when compared with Yahoo:

 Can you think of others?

Also, I'd love to read your thoughts on creativity.  What media do you use to express yourself?  And how do you integrate it into your work life?  It's an endlessly fascinating subject and one I'd love to discuss through comments and further posts.