The disproportion between a person's expectations and actual achievements often disturbs his or her emotional stability in the form of a crisis. For example, the unexpected loss of work or health can bring us down; but it can also empower us if our reaction or attitude is positive. Rebellion is often an added problem; on the other hand, acceptance in the form of challenge is an opportunity to mature and rethink our goals in life.

 Personal crises can be opportunities to reinvent oneself. Steve Jobs, after being fired from Apple, the business he had founded, reinvented himself by creating Next and Pixar: "I had traded the weight of success for the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure of things. That freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been kicked out of Apple. I think it was horrible medicine, but I guess the patient needed it."

For Albert Einstein "crisis is the best blessing that can happen to people and countries, because it brings progress. Creativity is born out of anguish, as day is born out of dark night. It is in crisis that inventiveness, discoveries and great strategies are born."

That initial anguish can and should be transformed into creative tension, into a stimulus for ingenuity, as long as it is faced with hope, strength and courage. But this benefit is not obtained by those who get frustrated in the face of any problem. The latter is currently happening to many adolescents and young people who are overprotected by parents who go ahead and sweep the street of life.

A well-known Spanish proverb says that "necessity sharpens the wit". This possibility occurs, above all, in extreme situations in which the person has to resort to imagination to survive.

Ingenuity is a form of creativity that allows a quick solution to a problem. It is skill to find adequate means to an end. Ingenious is the one who has the capacity to imagine or invent things combining with intelligence and skill the knowledge he possesses and the means at his disposal. Let's see an example.

"I am a teacher and students who copy papers hate me: not only do I see that the text was copied from the Internet, but often I can also tell from which site. Recently, one of them again handed me a copied work . I read it and realized that, although I had seen the content before, I couldn't remember the text. It turned out that the student had downloaded the work and had completely rewritten it, replacing literally every word with a synonym. I gave him an eight for ingenuity and effort (blog heard around).

Why did Cervantes describe Don Quixote as ingenious? Because in everything he was guided by imagination, a capacity that is associated with ingenuity.

We can learn from the "ingenuity" of some ants. Once someone saw an ant carrying a load of straw that was five times longer than itself. After a short distance, it reached a crevice. The straw made it difficult again and again to jump to the other side, until finally the ant did something unusual. With skill he leaned the ends of the straw on one edge and the other of the crack, and thus built himself a bridge, across which he was able to cross the "abyss".

We can also learn from the ingenuity of a castaway.
A young Indonesian worked and lived alone, from the age of 16, on a floating wooden platform to catch fish. He was in charge of maintaining the lighting set up as bait to attract fish. One day a strong swell swept the platform, which lacked an engine and oars, into the ocean and it drifted away. The young man relied on a solar-powered radio to warn ships he might come across. The food he was carrying ran out in just a few days and he survived by fishing. He burned wood from the platform itself to cook the fish and drank seawater through his clothes to minimize salt consumption. Finally, after 49 days of drifting, he was picked up by a ship that heard his SOS in the waters off Guam.

Creativity is educable. The adverse situations that propitiate the emergence of ingenuity can be "provoked" in a preventive way in the school, proposing to the students to look for causes and propose solutions for some real life problems.