Creativity is usually discussed in terms of breakthroughs - the invention, the painting, the startup pitch. But creativity as it actually operates in a human day is far more granular and far more fragile than the mythology suggests. Researchers at the University of North Carolina studying daily micro-creative acts found that people engage in moments requiring novel problem-solving, language adaptation, or associative thinking dozens of times before lunch. The question is not

Most creativity literature frames the challenge as generating more ideas. The volume question. But there is a prior and subtler problem that rarely gets named precisely: how do you know whether a response is genuinely creative, or merely competent, or pleasantly unexpected, or genuinely far-fetched to the point of uselessness? And underneath that, a structural problem borrowed from economics - the fact that in any real ideation session, a tiny fraction of responses do almost