The Aha-Moment!

Did you ever notice that sometimes when you’ve been thinking about a particular subject for a while that you’ll then stumble across a book, article, or video about it that hits home for you?  Something that generates an aha-moment when you say, “Yes!  Exactly!”  That’s what happened to me this week when I was thinking about the subject of creativity, and I’m sharing this story here because people might get value from the resources that I found as a result.

A Nine-Minute Video Worthy of Your Time

I’ve been reading a lot lately about personal creativity and how important it is not only for ourselves in our daily lives, but also how it impacts others around us.  The YouTube algorithm picked up the fact that I was researching this, and pushed a video into my Recommended list by Ethan Hawke called “Give Yourself Permission to Be Creative”. 

The title of the video at the link above caught my eye, so I watched it.  Ethan is an engaging storyteller; it feels like you’re sitting in the bar in this video talking to him.  The points he highlights through his stories are so salient that when it was over, I immediately watched it a second time to let it sink in.

Our Creativity Helps Us Know and Grow Ourselves

I’m a huge believer in knowing oneself.  I don’t think you can get to know and understand others or the world around you unless you know yourself first.  You’re the basis of how you experience everything around you.  It’s similar to the old adage “You have to love yourself first before you can love someone else.”

In the video, Ethan speaks about the fact that we get to know ourselves through our creativity.  This is something I’ve often tried to share with people I know.  Through our curiosity and creativity, we learn our potential, we discover the things we love, and we understand how and what we think.  Expressing creativity is also fun!  Through creativity, we explore, we recognize the wonders in our world, and we live with a sense of awe about what’s around us every day.  These are the things that make us alive! 

With that in mind, here are some key thoughts I took away from the video:

  • You come to life through your creativity.  It gives back to you many times over.
  • What do you love?  If you get close to what you love, who you are is revealed to you, and it expands.
  • Give yourself permission to be creative.
  • Do you think human creativity matters?
  • To thrive and express yourself, you have to know yourself.
  • Your experiences are not as unique as you think.  We all have so much in common with other people. Through creativity, you see how connected we all are. 
  • Are you spending your life doing what’s important to you?
  • Your creativity is vital.
  • There is no path until you walk it.
  • Always keep your beginner’s mind, and be willing to play the fool.

Don’t Convince Yourself That You’re Not Creative

I’ve known a lot of people who’ve said the same thing to me when the subject of creativity comes up, which is “I’m not a creative person.”  When people say that, it honestly makes me a bit sad because I know what creativity can bring to a person and how it can help lead to a more enjoyable and fulfilling life.

If they’re open to discussing it, I usually push back on them a bit by asking some questions about the things they like to do, what hobbies they have, what things they generally enjoy doing with their time, why they think they’re not creative, etc.  Inevitably, we end up surfacing the fact that they like a lot of things that could easily spin into a way for them to express their creativity, and we end the discussion with them often saying “I never thought about that, maybe I could try it.”  

Precisely!

Give yourself permission to be creative, and don’t convince yourself ahead of time that you’re not.  It’s completely self-defeating to shut yourself down that way. Explore yourself and your ideas, see how good it feels.

Some Creativity Resources

In line with the above, and with the possibility of opening your mind to your creative ideas and processes, I’m sharing a few resources here to get you going. The first two are articles about realizing your creativity that I read the other day, and the third is a podcast that focuses on creativity in general from one of my favorite photographers.  

  • Creativity Is a Process, Not an Event – I love the title of this one!  Creativity is not a one-and-done thing.  It’s an evolutionary, revelatory process across time and emotion, rooted in a growth mindset.  James Clear also connects with Ethan Hawke’s sentiment about being willing to play the fool.
  • Creativity: How to Unlock Your Hidden Creative Genius – A comprehensive article with many great links to other articles, guides, and books about realizing, enjoying, and growing your creativity.  Well worth a long look…
  • A Beautiful Anarchy – David duChemin, who is a well-regarded author and photographer, describes his podcast as, “…a heart-felt kick-in-the-pants podcast for everyday creators and anyone who’s ever mud-wrestled with their muse. These 15-minute podcasts are an honest and sensitive exploration of the joys and struggles of the creative life.”

Some Thoughts About My Creative Journey

From the list above of key thoughts from Ethan’s video, these two resonated with me the most:

  • You come to life through your creativity.  It gives back to you many times over.
  • What do you love?  If you get close to what you love, who you are is revealed to you, and it expands.

I’ve constantly felt these two things to be true throughout my creative experiences with photography, writing, and music (among others).  Here’s why…

Photography:

Photography has taught me different ways to see the world around me, which in many ways has “brought me to life” and has certainly “given back to me many times over.” 

It’s taught me to slow down and notice the small details all around me, which helps bring me a sense of awe about our world every day.  I flex my creativity through my lenses, and I understand how to use the angle, color, and intensity of light and shadow to emphasize my subjects.  I learned the ability to see an entire scene for what it is, but also break it down into many different smaller scenes that tell their own story within the bigger story.  Photography makes me think, and it has also altered my thinking.  It taught me how to capture the things that move me in the single instant of a photograph. A true gift! In fact, I use the same thinking patterns from photography (e.g., breaking situations down, understanding options, feeling and representing emotion, etc) in many different areas of my life.

Writing:

Like photography, writing has also helped me learn to think more, and differently.  For me, writing is about conceiving and reviewing my thoughts; organizing them and distilling them. I write to surface emotion, and then piece everything together and get it out of my mind and onto a page in an understandable and relatable way.  It doesn’t matter if I’m writing for myself in my journal, writing an article for this website, or something else.  The process of going from thoughts in my mind to written words is an extraordinarily rewarding process for me, and has helped me grow in ways that I never imagined. I write every day to practice this craft that has given so much back to me.       

Playing Music:

Music taught me one main thing; I can do it!  That’s now one of my most important mantras in life, and I’ve applied that principle countless times in all types of situations since I first learned to play bass guitar more than 25 years ago.  

I’m not a natural musician, I don’t have perfect pitch, and I can’t read music.  All these years later, the same three things are still true, but that never stopped me from playing.  Back in the day, I bought myself a bass guitar and a practice amp because I’ve always liked the rhythmic aspects of music, and I wanted to learn how to play bass.  Buying some basic equipment and trying it seemed like a reasonable way to move forward.  I trudged along, slowly struggling with the playing techniques until I got fairly good.  I was seeing progress!

At some point, I bumped into someone at work and mentioned that I was learning to play.  She said, “I’m forming a band. Do you want to play bass guitar with us?”  I had serious doubts that I could play well enough to be in a band, and I told her that, but she wouldn’t hear it and instead handed me a list of about 30 songs and said, “Learn these songs. The first show is in a month.”

Suddenly, I found myself in a band!  I spent countless hours over those next 30 days learning those songs; playing them over and over, section by section, to pick up the bass lines.  I went to our practice sessions in a local studio that we rented, and slowly things came together. My confidence grew, and those first feelings of “I can do this” started to emerge.  

By the time of our first show in a local bar, I was as ready to go as 30 days of preparation would allow me.  I stood up in front of the crowd on the makeshift stage and plowed my way through the night.  I was terrified and energized at the same time, and things went basically fine.  There were some high moments where things really clicked between the players, and some terrible mistakes where I wanted to duck and hide, but I got through it.  

Show after show, we got better, but that first band eventually ended.  By that time, I had gotten good enough to join two other bands after the first one, and combined, those bands played a few hundred shows over my “bar band career”.  I played until my wife and I decided to start a family, and then I quickly learned that playing out in bands until 4:00 a.m. and getting home when the sun was coming up wasn’t going to work with hungry and excited kids getting up two hours later. That was the end of the local band scene for me, until maybe a later point in life.

I never forgot the lessons I learned about myself in those bands, primarily that I could do it in the first place.  I learned to play, conquered stage fright, built confidence, and eventually got creative enough with my playing to start inserting my own ideas into the cover songs we played in a way that suited the songs well.  My bandmates would give me a sly smile when they caught the fact that I changed the bass line in a song, even if a casual listener in a bar would never notice that level of detail.  I carried all of those learnings with me through the years, and I use them every day. 

I also learned one other important thing from music, which is the power of creativity when practiced with other people.  Photography and writing are solitary activities, they’re not things I typically do with other people.  Music and playing in bands is the opposite; it’s all about other people.  There’s nothing like the feeling of playing music in a band, when the show starts and everyone is musically in sync, and things are really clicking the whole night.  It simply feels great! The energy, laughter, creativity, fun, and good times really come through.  That’s what it’s all about.  I never forgot those feelings, even all these years later.

Give Yourself A Chance

Exploring your creativity is fun! It’s exciting, revealing, challenging, and will reward you many times over in life.  You’ll likely discover new things about yourself that you never knew existed, and enhance the parts of yourself that you already enjoy.  It’s a matter of giving yourself a chance to try new things; to grow. 

The creativity you discover is something that can serve you in every facet of your life, from your home environment to your business life, to your relationships and beyond.  Feel that power, strength, and excitement; go create!

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