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National Live Creative Day 2024
How nice that National Live Creative Day falls on a weekend this year. It’s certainly easier to focus on our creativity when we’re not under the gun to get work done.
Lose Our Fear
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. ~Joseph Chilton Pearce
Haven’t been too creative lately and it’s killing me.
I feel as if I’m going to flip my wig if I don’t carve out some time to get started on this year’s Holiday Season Serial Romance, but there is so much to do…
Well, creativity isn’t restricted to arts & crafts.
Creativity is seeing things in a different way and creating a new method of execution.
I’ve been in panic mode for the majority of the last 2½ months and one can only be reactive for so long.
Eventually, stress is not enough to keep you going. Eventually, stress simply weakens and destroys you.
I’ve been there enough times to see it coming. Sometimes, seeing it coming isn’t enough stimulus to help you step out of the way.
Well, I’ve come to an inflection point rather than a breaking point.
I don’t have the option to break this time around.
I need to bend.
I have to sort, order, shred and produce.
Things are entirely too jumbled. I need to sort things into manageable pieces and set them up to get done expeditiously.
Above all, I need to get this stuff done so I can get back to some semblance of work/life balance rather than working myself to exhaustion and sitting here like a barely living organism until I fall asleep and start all over again.
True creativity is about creating.
Creating output. Creating results. Creating time for myself to do something other than work-related stuff.
Good thing today’s theme is what it is. It’s a reminder to come up with a creative alternative to working myself to death.
Live a Creative Life
I Was a Successful Tech CEO. Now I Write About Dragons and Magic
This guy is interesting. His videos are thought-provoking and sometimes infuriating.
I’m glad he survived his point of no return and found a new way to be.
I wasn’t quite so lucky. My recovery was on the scale of years, but the lesson is much the same.
If you’re on a treadmill, rushing to your own destruction, stop.
Take a good long look in the mirror and ask yourself if whatever you’re grinding on will actually get you anywhere or anything.
It’s okay to fly on afterburners for a while if you’re in sight of a goal. That little extra oomph is often what’s needed to accomplish something worthwhile.
Grinding yourself into a wretched paste because competence is its own punishment and there’s actually no end goal other than continuing to wring every last bit of effort from your body does nobody any good.
Take it from me. I’ve been there. There’s only so much a person can do. If a person is stressed half out of their mind, they generally can’t even do that.
Be creative. Be kind to yourself. Find a new thing or a new way to do the current thing. Make a change for the better however you can.
Connecting Things
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. ~Steve Jobs
Exactly. Creativity isn’t something you set out to do. It’s whatever you can’t help doing.
When someone is a natural born motorhead, they just fix things. They’re tinkerers, fixers, inventors and puzzlers.
They do with ease what I can only struggle to do. They do what they were born to do.
I, on the other hand, am good at other things. I work with ideas, notions, theoreticals and hypotheticals.
The problem is, the hands-on folks have something to show for their work. A fixed car, a knitted sweater, a woven rug, a fancy wedding cake.
Idea people generally have nothing to show the hands-on people.
I’ve created buttons on screens. What happens if my button wasn’t there? Well, somebody just did it themselves.
The thing about the button is not so much that it made your broken car go or that it made a pretty cake that people would remember for years, it’s just that it did something you can do almost instantaneously so you don’t have to.
I created time to do something more productive. How do you show that to the wife and kids? I’ve tried. They nod and smile. Dad makes buttons. Cool.
But, whatever. The fact is that when I do what I do, it makes somebody’s life a little easier. That’s the nature of the work I do.
What I’ve discovered, or rather have known deeply all along, is this natural inclination to deal with ideas can express itself in story.
I played tabletop RPGs for years. We had a lot of fun. I created stories with my friends. Again, nothing there to show anyone.
Dice were rolled. Stories were spun. Jokes were cracked. Snacks were eaten. At the end of the night, nothing to show to anyone.
I guess you could say the same is true of a game of touch football, beach volleyball or mini-golf with friends.
Maybe somebody took pictures or kept the scorecards, but at the end of the game there’s nothing to show but the happiness of having done it.
Finally, knowing that I had an affinity for story, there is something that’s nothing that’s something that I can actually do.
Until recently, when people aspired to be writers, it was a pipe dream at best. The gatekeepers were absolute.
Around 2010, storytelling finally became democratized. Granted, this has given license to scammers to carpet bomb the reading public with effortless crapola.
The important thing is that if you are willing to shoulder the burden that was previously assumed by publishing houses, you can just do it.
At last, I can make something that people can hold in their hands and enjoy. Unlike my many, many buttons, these don’t save time for anyone.
They take some time to read, but hopefully, they are worth the time spent in the realms of my imagination. Either way, there’s a thing I can show someone that can sit on a shelf or be handed off to friends.
Creativity is finally able to turn ideas into things. Gotta love the 21st Century…
That’s all for today. If you already have a favorite creative activity, I hope you find time to engage in it this weekend. If not, think hard about finding one. Life is about more than the grind.