Today is Father’s Day. In honor of my parents, I thought I’d celebrate with a few musings on how my childhood nurtured creativity.
Creative environments encourage trying.
What trying looks like? Sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding. And a ton of work. I was lucky: my parents wanted my brother and me to find what made us happy. That didn’t always mean we were good at what we did. As we learned what we liked, our schedules shifted from volleyball to soccer, piano to yearbook (me) or robotics (my brother). I wasn’t good at everything, but my parents graced us with the opportunity to try.
Creative environments are often inspired by others.
Music played a big role in my childhood. While my peers preferred Top 40 on their hand-held radios, I waited to come home to listen to the crack of vinyl, from Elvis to Beach Boys, my parents had it all. When I finally got my hands on an iPod in middle school, bought on the cheap from my cousin, the other students were shocked at the variety, borrowing it to hear Kurt Cobain, mixed with Styx, mixed with 50 Cent. Both my mom and dad are musically inclined. My dad can recognize any song from the 40s-80s within the first few chords. My mom can sing. While I tried piano, I was more inspired to dance. I extended and expressed myself through movement and music. Dancing, like concerts, removes me from life’s worries, by focusing on connecting with the beats. I miss dance and might return, possibly to lyrical.
Creative environments encourage connections.
A classically trained engineer, my dad finds connections when others don’t. In elementary school, I favored English, then aptly named “Language Arts.” It wasn’t until college that I applied my own understanding of the world across disciplines. Liberal Arts was the perfect fit because it allowed me to see the world as contradictory, connected, and therefore complicated. Liberal Arts encouraged me to self-design my major, which led to applying social theories to Fight Club and identity theories to Facebook.
A creative environment will nurture you into thinking, and even doing, differently.
I believe one way to define creativity is freedom: the act of intersecting ideas that may have never crossed paths before. That’s why I’m so excited by Inspiration System. That’s why I’m so excited by learning. That’s why I’m motivated to get up in the morning: I want to encourage you to find creative environments and start working on what makes YOU happy, just like my parents gave me (thanks, guys). Whether you find your people, here or elsewhere, online or off, it’s time to make a creative community. Who’s in?