What is creativity?

Over the past month of my Creating Something Everyday challenge I gave myself for the summer, I often ended up asking myself, "Is that creative?"

For example, is it creative to make your family dinner?  Is it more creative because it excites you? Is it less creative to follow a recipe?  Or is it only creative when you alter it to your tastes and dietary needs?

The definition of creativity is the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.

So then what about the creative process?  How creative is learning a skill or method?  If I follow a recipe to understand ingredients and cooking methods and then make it again with alterations, is the first recipe not part of the creative process?

I just had a conversation the other day about creativity and what makes an "artist."  Why are there so many beautifully creative people who are hesitant to claim themselves as artists?  It may be that this definition of original ideas and artistic work is one that we feel separate from.  My question is..what if creativity is more inclusive than that?  So I did some light reading (just a little, it was late).

In one article Samuel McNerny writes that Friedrich Nietzsche (late 1800s Germany) "believed that creativity is not about  solving problems, divergent thinking or making remote associations but destroying old systems of thought and breaking from the status quo."  This is what everyday creative people shy away from.  It's too big a concept!

Whereas Sandeep Guatam's article on creativity explains the difference between creativity on a small (small c), middle, and larger (big C) scale where the process of creativity includes the following skills: improve, innovate, insight, and imagination.

It's Nietzsche's and today's definition of creativity (big C thinking) that invalidates the important everyday small c thinking. So when I imitate and improve a recipe while better understanding the function of the ingredients I am using small c thinking.  And once I feel comfortable (or adventurous!) and write my own recipe I'm using middle c?

So that thing you made/ baked/ wrote/ carved/ grew..... is it creative?  It's really individual perspective.  I want to see more people who value their own small c thinking and see themselves as creative.