01
Creativity is a confidence problem, not a talent one.
Almost everyone is born with it. Almost no one keeps it. The work isn't to teach creativity from scratch — it's to dismantle the beliefs that drained it.
The premise
Most adults lost it.
Most of them can get it back.
Researchers at NASA, looking for original thinkers, used a creativity test on five-year-olds. 98% scored at the genius level. By 25, that number had fallen below 3%.
We don’t lose creativity at 25 — we lose permission for it. Two decades of practice tells us the door back is well-marked, just rarely walked through.
97% Creative is the door.
What we believe
Four beliefs
the platform is built on.
02
Practice beats inspiration.
Daily micro-decisions — share the half-formed idea, try the uncertain thing — compound into a confident creative life. Inspiration shows up for people who turned up first.
03
Research over rhetoric.
Every tier, prompt, and exercise is anchored in cognitive psychology and creativity research. We cite. We don't sermonise.
04
Small surfaces, deep work.
One assessment, one Field Guide, one Brief Builder, one set of prompts. Slow, considered, useful — not a stream of disposable content.
The person
Ben Rennie
Author of Lessons in Creativity, founder of Rennie Lab, and a long-time builder of brands, products, and the occasional surf school. He runs the Field Guide workshops, the prompts archive, and most weeks of Analog, his Substack.
97% Creative is the public-facing arm of his decade-long argument: that creativity is not a personality type, and it can be rebuilt.