Lately, I’ve noticed two things…1) I’ve barely been taking the time to write here, in this blog. And 2) that I’ve been really focusing a lot of time and energy around being creative. You know, doing art for the sake of art.
Funny how when you think about it, both are so closely related. I mean, writing is clearly a form of expressing ones self creatively. Yet for some reason, while I’ve managed to write a weekly newsletter and weekly blog posts over on my business side of things, as well as create two books over the summer break, I’ve not carved out time to write over here.
I blame part of it on Facebook. Before we had social media, the main way that bloggers shared our thoughts with the world was to blog about them. And well, that took some time to do…you had to write it out, find photos (because they kept telling us that we need photos or our posts won’t ever get read), format it, pretty it up, and post it. Then you had to wait for folks to find it and fingers-crossed, read it and leave a comment.
Then we had Facebook (which I’ll admit, I was way slow in getting into), where we could share whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted with our friends and we had instantaneous feedback in the form of comments or likes (or back in the good ol’ days, even dislikes). And on Twitter, we had an even bigger audience to share anything and everything (as long as it was 140 characters) with the entire world. Much like with our blogs, anyone could follow along. Things went by so quickly on Twitter that it really didn’t matter if folks commented or retweeted or whatever, as long as you had those followers, you were golden.
Which is really just my way of saying that I kind of left the more personal side of blogging, for my social networks. In particular, for Facebook. You know where I could share any photo, story, article, or random thought.* It’s so easy. Oh, how I love me some Facebook *sigh*
As for that “creativity” thing…this is something that I’ve actually been leaning into for the past couple years. I’ve read books. I’ve taken a couple classes. I’ve picked up art supplies to play with. I’ve taken my camera everywhere (and now I’m rarely without one thanks to my iPhone). I’ve written, drawn, stamped, colored, painted, taped, glued, and sparkled.
Yet, I still find that I struggle with this concept a bit.
Lately, I’ve gotten more comfortable with the fact that while I might never call myself an artist (let along an artiste!), as an entrepreneur and a writer, I AM creative. When you think about it, one can’t create a business if they’re not creative. The mere process of running your business, setting up the systems, creating the products and services…that’s all a creative, artistic process.
I don’t think I really understood that fully until I read Tara Gentile’s The Art of Earning. She goes into a lot of explanation how the very process of earning income, is an artistic process. Essentially going on to say that when you get down to it, living life is a creative process.
And this makes sense to me.
As a teacher, I think it’s really important to get our children comfortable with creativity. Not just art and music. But the outside of the box thinking that is necessary to succeed in life and business. The sports, the dance, the story telling, the critical thinking. All of it. It’s all part of embracing your creativity.
If you’d like to dig a little deeper and learn more about your creative side, I’d recommend you pick up Tara’s book (it’s only $3 for the digital copy – less than a latte at Starbucks). I think it might get you looking at your daily experiences a little differently.
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* if you’d like to follow along my FB journey of randomness, feel free. I don’t friends folks I don’t know, but you’re more than welcome to “subscribe” (and I do share things regularly that my subscribers can access).