The Creativity Training Program, Take Two

Two years ago, in the summer of 2012, I was just starting to think about what my master’s thesis would be.  I was halfway through Lesley University’s community art program, submerged in writing by Sir Ken Robinson, Daniel Pink, Tina Seelig, and John Maeda and enamored with their concepts of art, community, creativity, and what all that meant.  At the same time, I was seeing a man who taught me the word entrepreneur and encouraged me to take my extravagant visions of an art center and turn them into an actual business.

My first idea combining these two influences was to develop a creativity training program for businessmen, doctors, and teachers to help reintroduce creativity into those professions — I am not someone, after all, to aim low.

This concept was quickly squashed by the doubts of those around me which only reinforced my own insecurities.  Who was I, as a nineteen-year old graduate student, to tell professionals how to use creativity to do their job better?

As a result, this idea got tabled in favor of Don’t Make Art, Just Make Something, a book I wrote as much for myself as for anyone else to address the problems we all face getting started.

It’s been over a year now since I launched Don’t Make Art, Just Make Something, four months since I gave a TED talk on it, and I find myself in search of a new project.  I have several projects in motion, from the monthly Dinner, Art, + Music nights to the creation of my tiny house and the BIG Tiny House Festival.  You’d think that the last thing I need is something else to work on, but my creativity is calling out for a new project that is more than logistics and planning and in order to practice what I preach I’ve decided it’s best to listen.

And so I’m returning, after several overly-analyzed introspective conversations with various cornered friends (thanks guys), to The Creativity Training Program.  Two years later, I have had enough conversations, hosted enough events, and led enough art projects to dredge up the shaky confidence to start this project.  I plan to write a new blog post to be shared every Sunday night about what I’ve learned and what I am continuing to learn.  I may not be much farther than the nineteen-year old graduate student who was too intimidated to start this, but I’ve found that the only way to actually figure out what you’re doing is to just do it.

So here goes something. 

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The first thing you need to know is that you don’t have to be an artist.

Don’t get me wrong, I love artists.  I am an artist.  But not everyone is and not everyone should be.

This doesn’t go for just artists: not everyone should be an engineer, a lawyer, a teacher, a reporter, or a politician either.  Everything would become quite unbalanced.

The idea that everyone is an artist comes from our growing culture of participation rewards.  The problem with this is that if everyone is rewarded, the worth of every reward is diminished.  If everyone is an artist, all artists are undervalued.

This is not to say that you can’t make stuff.  I’m no athlete, but I’m glad someone gave me the chance to kick around a soccer ball.  I usually missed and ended up kicking people in the shins, but I had a blast doing it.  You may not be an artist, but that doesn’t mean you can’t pick up a pencil and doodle a little something.

Because though not everyone is an artist, everyone is creative.  Creating is a natural byproduct of being alive, whether you acknowledge it or not.  Every step you take makes a footprint, every time you speak you make a sound and sometimes you even manage string together a coherent sentence.

This ability to create is what makes life so damn fun.  I mean, really, just take a moment and think of all the wacky, wonderful, effective, efficient, odd things that people make.  And then think about how many more of those things we’d be making if we put aside our learned fear of creating and recognized that we’ve each been creating things all along.