Seven years ago today I did a very strange thing: I published the first post of this blog. It was a step into the unknown and frankly felt ridiculous. Nobody knew I even had a blog because until I pressed “publish” on that strange little post no such blog existed. But I stuck with it, and the blog you see today is a healthy seven years old. If it were a human it would be in the second grade and missing it’s front teeth.
Many of us harbor a lurking sense that we spend too much time reading email. “Is this all there is?”, we ask ourselves while trying to sort through the spam, faux-urgent messages, and meeting invites that appear to breed like rabbits.
I’m not telling you something you don’t already know, but the answer to your question is “no”. You are a “human being”, not a “human doing”. Carving out creative time is important because, well, you’re a human and being creative is one of the things that make you different from a rock or the paper number dispenser at the deli.
One of my favorite posts from this blog was when I vented about something that annoys me, namely when people respond to some creative endeavor with the accusation that “you have too much time on your hands”. In the post, which you can read here (and pass around to your friends), I wrote:
“Why don’t some people create anything? I think one reason is that we outsource creativity today to professionals. We let the people in our iTunes library entertain us with music, rather than making any ourselves. We read content and think “I could never write like that”, so we don’t.
But here is a powerful idea that empowers you to be creative right now: while it is important to create, it is not necessary to be any good.
Make bad music. Write bad poetry. Dangle your modifiers.”
On this blog’s seventh birthday, let me tell you that you are capable of doing something that has been on your mind but you haven’t really pursued. Let me push you toward that thought. The act of creation is a two-step process: step one is envisioning something, and step two is the actual creation. Moving from step one to step two seems more daunting than it is. Go for it.
Good luck!