Understanding the Creative Mind

An Unexpected Discovery

I started out wanting to build a tool for artists.

That was the goal when I began working on ENSOhello. To create something that could genuinely help artists show up and share their work without draining the energy they’d rather spend creating.

What I didn’t expect was that, in the process of building it, I would learn something much bigger about how creative minds actually work.

That insight didn’t arrive all at once. It surfaced gradually through conversations, questions, and paying attention to where things felt easy, and where they didn’t.

Early on, I spent a lot of time talking with artists (painters, makers, performers, and creative solopreneurs) about where they felt stuck, what made sharing their work feel heavy, and what they wished existed but didn’t.

Then came the next phase: watching artists use the earliest versions of the app. Listening to their reactions. Noticing where things flowed and where friction appeared.

Over time, a clear pattern emerged.

The challenge wasn’t motivation. Or discipline. Or a lack of understanding.

It was a mismatch.

The systems most creatives are asked to work inside (the tools, the language, the expectations ) often aren’t designed with the creative mind in mind.

I didn’t set out to study how creative minds are different.

But building ENSOhello made that difference impossible to ignore.

An Analogy

One way I’ve found helpful in thinking about this difference is through an analogy.

Being left‑handed in a right‑handed world isn’t dramatic. There’s no crisis attached to it. But it does require constant, quiet adjustment.

Most tools, systems, and spaces are designed with a right‑handed default in mind. Scissors, desks, notebooks. None of them is intentionally exclusionary. They’re simply built for the majority.

Left‑handed people learn early how to make it work. Adjust grip, angle the page, flip the notebook around, or find tools that cooperate a little better. Over time, those adaptations become automatic.

Most of the time, no one notices.

But the left‑handed person always does.

That awareness, the sense of quietly accommodating what wasn’t designed for you, turned out to be essential to how I began to understand creative minds.

This analogy isn’t about rarity or special treatment. And it’s not a call to redesign the world around one way of thinking.

It’s simply a way to notice what happens when systems assume a default. And how those who don’t match that default spend a surprising amount of energy adapting, often without ever naming it.

The difference isn’t always visible from the outside.

But it’s felt.

When the Analogy Became Personal

The left‑handed analogy stopped being an interesting comparison and started to feel personal.

I don’t think I would have recognized how much creatives are constantly adjusting to fit into the world if I weren’t left‑handed myself.

Being left‑handed means living with a quiet, ongoing awareness that many things weren’t designed for you. You learn how to make it work. It’s rarely dramatic. But the reminders are constant.

That awareness proved essential to how I began to understand creative minds.

Over time, I noticed that creatives move through the world in a similar way. Not loudly. Not disruptively. But with a steady pattern of adaptation.

Creative thinking is often non‑linear. Progress doesn’t always move cleanly from idea to execution. It includes thinking time, wandering, experimenting, circling back, and sitting with something longer than feels productive on paper.

Insight frequently arrives before it can be articulated. Creatives often know something is working (or not) before they can explain why. In systems that reward immediate clarity, that gap can feel like a liability.

So creatives do what left‑handed people do.

They adjust.

They translate what they do into language that fits the systems around them. They compress intuitive processes into tidy summaries. They adapt their pace, their workflow, and often their expectations of themselves.

When friction shows up, many assume the problem is personal.

“I must not be disciplined enough.”
“I need to be more organized.”
“I should be able to make this work.”

But just like adjusting the grip on a pair of right‑handed scissors, that friction is often a signal, not of failure, but of mismatch.

The creative mind isn’t resisting structure.

It’s compensating for systems that were never designed with its natural rhythms in mind.

The Friction of Mismatch

When enough individuals are quietly adapting, the friction can start to look like a personal issue.

But step back far enough, and a different picture comes into focus.

Many of the systems creatives are expected to work within were built for linear thinkers, people who move comfortably from task to task, think out loud, and can articulate progress as it happens.

Creative work doesn’t usually unfold that way.

It moves in starts and stops. It loops. It requires space to think, experiment, discard, and return. The output may look simple, but the path to get there rarely is.

This is where the mismatch shows up most clearly.

Productivity models often reward visible output over invisible thinking. Administrative tasks interrupt flow rather than support it. Visibility expectations can feel performative, forcing creatives to translate internal process into external proof before it’s ready.

None of this is malicious or intentional.

It’s simply what happens when systems are designed around a default. And everyone else is expected to adapt.

Over time, that constant adaptation carries a cost.

Creatives expend energy managing the system instead of doing the work itself. They question their own capability. They internalize friction as failure.

But the issue isn’t resistance.

It’s compensation.

Creatives aren’t pushing back against structure.

They’re navigating structures that were never designed to support how their minds naturally work.

Impossible to Unsee

Building ENSOhello made this mismatch impossible to unsee.

As we worked to make the product feel intuitive to artists, I kept running into moments where something that seemed simple on paper felt oddly difficult in practice. The solution was rarely to add more structure or explanation. More often, it was to remove friction, soften the language, or allow for a different pace.

That’s when the realization landed.

The creative mind really is different.

Not better. Not worse. Just different.

And that difference isn’t something to work around or apologize for. It’s something to design for.

What surprised me most was how personal that realization became. In trying to design something that would feel natural to other creatives, I began to see how much of my own career had been spent translating myself into systems that weren’t built for how I think.

I had adapted so thoroughly that I rarely questioned the structures themselves. I assumed the friction was simply part of the deal.

Seeing it clearly for the first time felt both validating and unsettling.

Why This Matters (Beyond Artists)

This isn’t only an issue for artists.

Creative thinking shows up in far more places than we tend to acknowledge. In problem‑solving, strategy, leadership, education, and innovation. When systems flatten difference in the name of efficiency, they often lose the very thinking they depend on to move forward.

Designing with creative minds in mind doesn’t mean abandoning rigor or structure. It means recognizing that ease and clarity can coexist with discipline.

When systems make room for different ways of thinking, everyone benefits — not just creatives.

Building Space

ENSOhello didn’t begin as a list of features.

It began as a question: what would it look like to create space for creative minds to succeed without asking them to contort themselves first?

That question shaped every decision that followed: the language we use, the pace we allow, the way ideas are captured, and how visibility is approached.

The goal isn’t to force creative work into existing systems, but to reduce the need for constant translation.

To work with creative thought patterns. Not around them.

Closing Reflection

Creative minds are not broken.

And this isn’t an argument that every system needs to change to accommodate them.

It’s an acknowledgment that creative minds often succeed by compensating. By translating, adjusting, and working around structures that weren’t designed with their natural rhythms in mind.

What I care about, and what ultimately led me to build ENSOhello, is creating space where that constant compensation isn’t required.

A space where creative minds can function, express, and succeed without having to contort themselves first.

Becoming aware of that difference changes how we see ourselves and how we design the tools, systems, and expectations we rely on.

This is still an ongoing learning process for me.

But once the difference became visible, it couldn’t be unseen.

And awareness, I’ve learned, is often where better design begins.