"I can never find what I want, but the benefit is that I always find something else."
-Irvine Welsh
Letters live.
My colleagues have asked me so many times about “how to be creative”. But they used a tongue that sounds like they will never be creative in their lives.
”You have to try, and keep trying”, I replied.
One of my colleagues is a brilliant guy, a lawyer who has been making significant money from playing around in the investment world. We assume he got an “A+” in all of the MBA papers. He told me that he admires how I am good at art and painting kind of thing. These are the area he has never been good at in his life.
It surprised me that no matter how smart or thriving people are, they would think creativity as something to be born with or gifted.
My root cause of being creative or artistic is very straightforward: I was terrible at the study when I was young. And dabbling around drawing and playing with colours were something people would not judge about. It was a safe zoom that belongs to me.
I am not telling this story to justify how many barriers you could meet during your artistic or creative journey. Quite the opposite way, you need to force yourself to practice creativity. Personally, I had no choice. I wanted to be just like other children who can read adequately at the age of 7. I wanted to be good at math, but numbers did not make sense until I went to college.
Courage, being brave to try something you are not good at, is the secret to becoming creative.
Curiosity drives learning, but courage makes it happen. So if you want to be an artist, pick up a pen near you and start your first drawing in your life. It could be not pleasant, but it needs the courage to take action and face it. This is how you make progress in learning each new thing.
The Door of ?
I mentioned in the Human resource lecture that each new thing has a door. Our curiosity is the key and all of us have it from the beginning. But, are you brave enough to open it and to find out what is behind it? That’s how being creative is so hard in the business world. People are so good at their stuff: marketing, selling products, financing, and management knowledge. But, everything outside the business world, we are not going to touch it. It is out of our comfort zoom.
However, being creative is not a title or a job. It is a practice or a process. You can’t be creative by sticking to doing the same thing in the past ten years.
Think about it, with the current online resources and technology, and you can hardly find something that you CAN NOT LEARN how to do.
So, list everything you want to accomplish in your life and choose one to keep practice it. Before the product, there is a process.
Kun
Book to read: “Keep Going” — Austin Kleon