An Insurance Lawyer's Definition of Creativity

Defining Creativity

Michael Menapace is an insurance lawyer who applies the creativity cultivated as a saxophone player to the various aspects of his life. This episode of Defining Creativity is chock-full of analogies from Michael that demonstrate the application of creativity and its parallel between music and his current endeavors.

​Michael reflects: “My creative process in writing is very similar to how we were trained as musicians since we were five or ten… whenever we started… What I do now, whether it’s writing a book or it’s solving a legal problem, is I take the issue, I break it down into all of its component parts—I research those parts, I figure out the background and the history of those parts, I then perfect each one of them, I make sure that I’ve really dug in, and then I put the whole thing back together, so I can present it as a convincing whole. As a musician, this is what we’ve done since we started performing. We have a piece of music, it’s not a problem, it’s a piece of music—we break it down into its component parts, we understand where it came from, we understand the history, we break it down into every two measures, we perfect them so that we can perform them, and then we put the whole thing back together and have to present it to somebody as an effective piece of music, as a performance.”