When the movie Divergent came out, I felt understood. Finally, there was story about how utterly crucial the creative, intuitive people in society are to the well-being of the whole. Despite the ease in which they are misunderstood and judged for their non-conformist ways, the world desperately needs them.

Creative people believe anything is possible, imagining the unimaginable and convinced it can be accomplished. Even if the goal is a long shot, they’re willing to take risks and will be the first to jump in and get to work, ignoring the naysayers whose voices have become a background buzz that’s plagued and discouraged them all their lives.

In studies of the life of Leonardo da Vinci, I’ve always been struck by his insistence that most people live a limited existence, unaware of what they miss by never looking around them in appreciation. If that was true in his time, he’d be astounded at how little we even look up from a cellphone to notice where we are or who we’re with. I live near NC State University, and was passing by the school one day right after classes began for the fall semester. As I sat at the traffic light to let students cross the four lane highway on their way to dorms on the other side, I watched how they barely bothered with the unwelcome interruption of looking up in a herd mentality to follow one another across the street, eyes back down to their phone screens. It was like a watching a bunch of zombies, except that zombies might have their heads (skulls?) up and they would’ve been vastly more interesting!

If those students were living life using their God-given gift of senses even part of the time, they’d unchain themselves to richer lives and would understand creative people more. For those like da Vinci, life is fascinating—brighter, ablaze with color, alive with movement, scents, tastes, and unusual sounds, and composed of intriguing shapes. There is something to learn about and enjoy all around them, not because their senses pick up more information, but because they take time to look.

In that way, though most creative people are considered to be introverts, they actually spend more time looking outside their own world than “normal” people do! They glean information and fuel for endless impossibilities from around them, while other people are looking down at typically narrow, self-focused pursuits. The creative ones get to experience heightened emotional responses because in their eyes, the world it not a blur—it is loaded with meaning and possibilities!

The creative people among us find it difficult to do monotonous, repetitious tasks, because they thrive on the excitement of discovery and accomplishing something novel. Public methods of teaching are the antithesis of how creative people think, bent on squashing dreamers and thinkers and stripping most artistic and creative courses. After all, a look at history shows that people have always feared them, preferring a complacent, controllable populace that does not challenge the direction of meaninglessness that they are being led into—exactly like the herd of students crossing the street to the tune of the Pied Piper on the little screens that control their lives. This truth has never been clearer than in the cookie-cutter mindset of America’s classrooms right now.

Stories such as the Hunger Games and Divergent reveal a great truth—whether they realize it or not, society needs creative thinkers, however reluctant, who can show them what it means to be alive.