What is Creativity?

"What is Creativity?" is one of the questions I get asked the most. My answer is always simple: it is thinking without boundaries. Yes, I know there are a lot more precise, eloquent, and more correct answers out there but I never said or pretend to be anything but simple.

For me creativity is about letting loose. Everyone does this in their own way. Everyone sees the world differently, hears the space around us a bit different, tastes things that no one else can taste, feels the earth spin in their own unique way, and describes their environments in their own terms.

At least the above descriptions hold true until we get to a certain age; A certain age where we have to "behave". At some point in all of our lives we have been "shhhed" or given the glance that tells us that is not appropriate. For some of us unlucky ones perhaps we even got a gentle kick in the shin or a slight pinch on the arm when we have asked to many questions, or have spoken to loudly, or maybe even out of turn.

So we grow up and somewhere along the way after all of this squashing of our enthusiasm and our vigor to learn and ask questions we stop asking. We conform, we begin to wait our turn, we begin to say things we think others want us to say.

Creativity for me is about every once in awhile letting loose in whatever you feel comfortable doing it. Creativity does not have to be an amazing ART piece, or some aww inspiring design that you have concocted. It can be the way you tie your shoes, it can be wearing sandals until the snow hits, it can be about how you say good morning. Creativity is about finding a few things in you that you do just for yourself and that you do that some might even think is a little bit different. I mean imagine one day if you just decided to only write with a pack of crayons that you bought the night before and that you wouldn't stop writing with that pack of crayons until they were all used up? Would it be the end of the world? What if instead of making the same chicken meal you make every night you decided to go to the grocery store and buy everything and anything you have never ate in your life and tried making a dinner out of that?

My main argument for all of this is people (myself included) can sometimes be boring. So why don't you challenge yourself to just once colour outside of the lines and see what happens? Does the world fall apart?


Don't get stuck in life, be creative:

STORYTIME:

This post was inspired from a rather interesting situation I got to observe.

Imagine 7 in the morning standing in line at the grocery store in the middle of October. Yes that is right it is dark out, there is almost no one else in the store, and there is definitely not a whole lot of noise. When all of a sudden this beautiful voice belts out "Good Morning, you are here to check out and I am just the lady for you." This kind of singing certainly woke everyone up who was in the store and put a smile on everyones face.
Behind the cash one of the elderly ladies who was working said that she always sings her good mornings and sings her customers through the line because it is so early and that often she has been in the store for so many hours that she too needs to have a bit of fun.
It was amazing to see everyone in the store react so positively to this wonderful older lady who certainly was not afraid to let loose, be a little bit creative with her job, and inject a whole lot of fun for everyone around.
You know the old saying "sing like no one can hear you" well she did just that and she says that is what gets her through the late night shifts that last until the wee hours of the morning. This lady says she loves her job and she loves her job because the store manager allows her to be herself. Don't you wish more of us could be ourselves? Were allowed to be ourselves?

Re-launching and uncertainty

Well  the day has come and went and it felt really good. The Creativision website has officially been re-launched and finally I am happy with it.

It is amazing how picky one can be. A couple of weeks ago I decided that a relaunch was necessary. So I went to work fixing up the website. I asked a bunch of people what they would like on a coaching website and got some feedback. I worked for probably 3 weeks on the re-design and had really liked the process of having to re-write everything and coming up with new ideas and incorporating old ideas that had worked in the past. I finally had a product at the end of it all that was publish worthy. And that's what I did, I hit the publish key but never really told anyone, I just let it sit there. Then as I would go through my day in and out I noticed I was constantly looking at the site, if not in real life, in my head, and I came to realize I didn't like it! What? Why? I had worked so hard on the site re-design and as I was doing it I felt really good about. But then that nasty entrepreneurship, solo guy going at it alone little flaw crept in-I was having self-doubt. Was this the site I really wanted? Could it be better? Was I missing something?

I also asked myself the biggest question of all-why didn't I tell anyone about this re-launch? Why did I just change the site?

Well I thought about this lots and I think I knew all along that I was not happy with the site therefore I just did it and didn't "put it out there". I find it amazing what our minds can do to us. I spent that whole 2 weeks that the first re-design was up second guessing myself to the point where I got very little sleep. I think I was right in second guessing myself as I think this version of the website is much more attune to the type of site and work that I do.

I am fascinated though that without thinking about it or being strategic that before this launch I made a big hubbub about it. I was so excited to unveil this site to the world and to see how people would react.

Why was I so proud of this one and not the other? I'm not 100% sure about the answer but all I know is that I think there is something in an entrepreneur that just tells you-"this is right".

Every now and again you just find a groove and you believe. So this is the point of this post-even when everything feels wrong and you're not quite sure about anything hold onto trust and belief. Trust in your own capabilities and believe that you can pull through.

Although this was just a little website re-design it was a big reminder for me. Entrepreneurs are stubborn, me included. And sometimes even the guy who is giving advice to others needs to listen to his own head. I had to relax and just believe that eventually something good would come. The piece I wrote about self-doubt just a couple of weeks ago certainly played into my head on this one and I didn't even realize it (hmmm....maybe that's another reason why I wrote that post).


Have you ever found yourself second-guessing yourself on even the smallest of details? What have you second guessed yourself about? How did you come through it?

Adaptation

Dealing with change is never easy, unless of course you practice it every day.

I felt compelled to write this article because of all the commotion going on with Facebook and how every time they make 1 or 2 changes (big or small) the nation (really the world) seems to go into a frenzy.

  Is all of this commotion necessary? I mean isn't it a good thing that facebook keeps changing? I wonder if facebook didn't ever change if it would go stagnant and eventually people would become bored with it and heaven forbid maybe not use it. As I write this I almost wonder if facebook sometimes makes these changes just to get peoples attention and to remind them that they are there. I know that facebook has become such a common part of everyone's daily routine and for most having a change in a routine can be so harsh. However, like I have said in other posts there really are no SURE bets in life so maybe all this change is a good thing. Maybe facebook is simply challenging us to stay on our toes. I mean look at it this way-are people really going to stop using facebook because of their changes? I highly doubt it so maybe adapting is the only way.

I'm just using the most recent and most widespread example here but I want each and every one of you who are reading this to think seriously about change; How well do we deal with change? How can we make life easier for ourselves in this ever changing (notice I didn't say evolving-this might be my next post) world of ours? 

One of my big arguments in life, especially as an entrepreneur and someone who has been working in and around education for the last decade or more is that we do not prepare ourselves very well to deal with change. I am of the belief that more emphasis in schools and other areas in life should be placed on dealing with change and adapting to the unknown. 

Oh the UNKNOWN (sorry, insert tangent here), just last week I spent 5 days with a high school group talking about fears and how we as a society deal with them (a whole other story) and what came out of that discussion was that so often (in fact number 1 in this small sample size) we are afraid of the UNKNOWN. I am not perfect by any means but I have been learning to live with the UNKNOWN and to deal with CHAOS whenever I can and I have to say this has made my life much easier and a lot more flexible, something I have come to cherish.

In the end I just want people (myself included) to really think about change and how it effects your life or better yet how we LET it effect out lives. How can we change that? One suggestion is add more spontaneity into your life. As a matter of fact, think of something right now that you have always wanted to do and take this 5 minute challenge: Go look up everything you can about it (whatever IT is) on the internet and even better if you can, book it-write it down-commit to doing something different and then TELL someone else, post it on your FB page (haha if you haven't boycotted it because of all the changes) or put it in your twitter feed, or whatever you need to do just get it out there! 

Believe me the more you try new things and the more you push your limits the more comfortable you will become with change and the unknown, thus the less you will have to fear in life. Embracing change is crucial, especially since we really don't have control over much in this life time.

Life has a lot to offer if only we can reach out and grasp it all. 

Get out there

Putting yourself out there is something that is incredibly hard for people to do. This past weekend I had the opportunity to continue a project I have been doing for over a year. I have been fortunate to travel around from place to place speaking to young people to teens to adults to senior and give them the opportunity to ask any question they want an answer to.

This "asking" has taken place in many different ways from balloon launches to placing questions in a bottle to putting them in books at library's and other bookstores to just handing a bunch of question from one school to another.

This experiment certainly has always brought about many amazing questions and even better has produced a wide variety of answers. One great example of this was when a teen wrote about his/her verbal abuse that they were taking at home from their parents. Roughly 3 months later a woman responded saying that she to had gone through that experience and she gave some of the tips she had to deal with it. After I posted the question and response there were so many others that wrote back and thanked me for posting that particular exchange because they too were going through something similar.

After I spent just a couple of hours doing this with a group of teenagers this past weekend I have, more than ever, come to realize that we don't ask enough questions. For some they have wonderful outlets to ask but for others there just isn't that outlet, that freedom of being safe from judgment, that honesty and trust.

I will continue to do this project and in the meantime am always encouraging others to put themselves out there. Ask the questions you want answers to big or small, because you are not alone.

A Worldly Choir

While watching this video this afternoon I am so totally blown away at this amazing idea (and execution):

I am also brought to dream, to wonder, and to become even more excited about our future and how technology, if used correctly, could really help us come together to do amazing things.

With the advances we are experiencing in virtual connections I am quite certain that our networks and our collective intelligence will grow and get stronger, deeper, more expedient, and more meaningful. 

Here is to looking forward to the future and how technology (may) help boost our productivity and usefulness on this planet.

What do you think about this video? about technology connecting us in the future? Does this change the way some of our challenges in society can be solved? Could this change how we learn about anything in life? Can we be entertained in a whole new way?