Ask a room of adults who among them is creative, and watch how few hands go up.

Ask a room of five-year-olds, and every hand is in the air, usually before you've finished the question.

Somewhere between those two rooms, most of us learnt that creativity belongs to other people. To artists, designers, musicians, writers: the ones with the portfolios and the job titles. The rest of us got the sensible jobs and the spreadsheets, and quietly filed our own creativity under things I used to do.

I think that's one of the great unnoticed losses of adult life. Not because everyone should become a painter, but because creativity was never really about art in the first place.

Creativity is a way of paying attention

Strip away the galleries and the awards, and creativity is something much simpler: the act of noticing what is, and imagining what could be.

That's it. It's the person who rearranges a cramped kitchen so it suddenly works. The parent who invents a bedtime story on the spot. The friend who cooks with whatever's left in the fridge and somehow makes it good. The colleague who finds a better way to run the same tired meeting. None of them would call themselves creative. All of them are doing exactly what creative professionals do: looking at a situation, refusing to accept it as fixed, and making something new.

Creativity isn't a talent you either have or don't. It's a muscle, and most of us simply stopped using it.

We've become extraordinary consumers

Here's what's changed. Never in human history have we had access to so much made by other people. Infinite music, endless shows, a bottomless scroll of other people's photos, opinions, recipes and lives. We spend our days receiving.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying other people's work. But a life of pure consumption has a strange emptiness to it. You can watch a hundred cooking videos and never feel what it's like to make a meal that's yours. You can save a thousand interior photos and never rearrange a single chair.

Making something, anything, flips the relationship. You stop being an audience to your own life and start being an author of it. Even in a small way. Especially in a small way.

Why it matters more than it seems

Everyday creativity isn't a hobby to fit in once the important things are done. It quietly feeds the important things.

• It makes you a better problem-solver. The habit of asking "what if we tried it another way?" doesn't stay in the kitchen. It follows you into work, relationships and every decision that looks stuck.

• It gives you somewhere to be present. When your hands are busy making something, your mind tends to stop rehearsing tomorrow's worries. Many people describe it as the closest thing they have to rest.

• It rebuilds a quiet kind of confidence. Finishing something, however small and imperfect, is a reminder that you can shape the world around you instead of only reacting to it.

• It makes ordinary life more interesting. Once you start making things, you start noticing how everything is made. The world gets more detailed.

The enemy is the word "good"

The biggest thing standing between most adults and their own creativity isn't time. It's the fear of making something bad.

Children don't have this problem. They draw a horse that looks like a potato and are delighted. Adults have learnt to compare everything against the polished, edited, professional work flooding their screens, and against that standard, our first attempts feel embarrassing. So we don't make them.

But the point of everyday creativity was never to be good. The point is the doing: the attention, the play, the small decisions. A wobbly hand-made card means more than a perfect bought one precisely because it's wobbly. It carries the evidence of a person.

How to start, without starting a "project"

You don't need a new hobby, a course or an expensive kit. You need small, low-stakes chances to make choices of your own. A few ideas:

• Cook without a recipe once a week. Open the fridge, make a guess, taste as you go.

• Rearrange one corner of your home. Move a lamp, swap two pictures, clear a shelf. Notice how it changes the room.

• Keep a notebook for noticing. Not journalling. Just collect things: a colour you liked, an overheard sentence, a shadow on a wall.

• Make something for someone. A note, a playlist, a terrible drawing. Giving makes it easier to forgive imperfection.

• Let yourself be bored. Boredom is the empty field where ideas grow. Leave the phone in another room and see what your mind does with nothing.

It finds a way

Look closely at any city and you'll see it: small green things pushing up through cracks in the concrete. Nobody planted them. Nobody gave them permission. They just found the smallest gap and grew.

Creativity is like that. It doesn't need a studio or a title or a perfect moment. It only needs a crack: ten minutes, a blank page, a fridge with three ingredients left. Give it the smallest opening, and it will grow.

You were a creative person once. You still are. You've just been waiting for permission. Consider this it.