I've been pretty awful about posting since getting back from Europe, I know. I honestly don't even have a reason for it, I've just been feeling lazy lately. Hopefully I'll have some time to write about some of the things I saw during my Eurotrip, but for now, I think I'll stick with news from Moscow.
I've been teaching one of my professor's sons English once a week to help make a little extra money this semester. My professor wants us to do things that are fun so her son actually enjoys learning a second language, rather than looks at it like the rest of his school work, so we do things like play darts, go for walks, and two weeks ago we were playing with his LEGOs. I was a huge fan of LEGOs when I was a kid, and I think you would be hard pressed to find any person around my age who didn't also enjoy building spaceships, or ancient tombs filled with zombies out of those little bricks. God help you if you ever stepped on one, but short of that, they may very well be the greatest toy known to man. You can choose to follow the directions and make what was originally invisioned for the set, you can mash up the sets and make stuff like an AT-AT from Star Wars with a dinosar head, or you can take the "directions are for pussys" route and start making whatever the hell you like out of all the blocks you have at your disposal.
My professor's son was busy building a pretty sweet space ship while I was asking him about the different colors of the blocks. I, on the other hand, had been kinda picking through the blocks and not really making anything. My young pupil took notice to the fact that, while he was already zooming around the room in his new intergalactic ride, I had nothing of my own, and he asked me "Did you forget how to play with LEGOs?" I tried explaining in Russian that I just didn't know what exactly I wanted to make and he said something to the effect of, "It's really easy! Just think of what you want, and then make it!"
Those words really stuck in my head for the rest of the day, and while I was walking home I had to wonder to myself, "how can I have forgotten how to play with LEGOs? It's one of the easiest, most fun things I can remember from when I was a kid." For the next few days I spent a lot of time wondering why nothing had come to mind while I was staring at those blocks sitting on the ground in front of me, and I found an answer:
I've lost my sense of creativity
The thought had occurred to me that same day, while I was walking home from my professor's home, but at the time I had told myself that it didn't really make sense. I have played the saxophone since I was in the 6th grade, and musicians are creative by default, right? The more I thought about it though, the more it made sense. As a musician, I've always loved playing big band charts. I love the feeling you get when a band grooves together, and it all just works, but, to a large extent, that's a technical skill. It requires some sense of feeling to know how the music should flow, but a lot of it comes down to reading the music sitting in front of you, so you're not really creating anything in the process. Improv, however, has always scared me stiff. The prospect of making something musical out of thin air always made me nervous, and I often did my best to shy away from practicing my improv skills. I would always do just enough to get by, rather than really jumping in balls deep to try, fail, try, fail again, and start to actually get better at the process of creating music.
I want to be able to create, have original ideas and make them a reality, and I found the prospect that I might not be a creative person unacceptable in all honesty. I thought more and more about it, and realized that if I was given an unlimited budget, unlimited time, and a Matrix like ability to download any skill I didn't already posses, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I mean sure, I would probably throw a few raging parties, go travel a bunch, use skills other people had spent lifetimes developing to win bets in bars, and eat in all the most expensive restaurants I could find wearing hand-tailored clothes, but that's really just the fantasies of a 20 something college student. If it really came down to it, and I had the resources to do anything I wanted to do with my life, I wouldn't know what I would want to do.
So I started a list.
"The list of things I would do in my life if time, money, and skill were not a factor" currently includes 52 different goals ranging from "fly a jet pack" to "become a published author," and I'm trying to add more as often as possible. When I get up in the morning, I try to imagine what baby steps I'm going to take that day to reach one of those goals, whether it's "go to class" (Learn to speak Russian fluently) or "do push ups" (Bench over 100% of my body weight), or anything else, and I think that it has been a pretty healthy exercise thus far, and has helped me open my own eyes to the kinds of things I want in life, and what I need to do to achieve those goals.
I reached out to one of my former employers, friends, and creative minds in Colorado, Kelly, to ask for her help in regaining that child-like creative power, and both she and her husband Peter have been very helpful. While talking with Peter I was able to find a reason beyond "because I wanna!" to try and rekindle my creative spark, and that's for becoming a better worker.
As we were talking about the importance of creativity in the workplace I thought of myself sitting in a room during an interview and hearing one of those stock questions, "What is your greatest weakness?"Not to seem like I think I'm the greatest guy on earth (although, I am pretty cool), but I've never had a good answer to this question. I'm punctual, smart, good under pressure, I work well alone and in groups, and I can solve problems creatively. I've come to realize something though, being a creative problem solver, and being a creative person are not the same thing. When I have been given a goal, an end point, I can find all sorts of ways to reach that point, and I'm pretty good at leading groups to reach goals too, but I struggle when I try to decide what that end point should be myself, and that's where being a creative problem solver and a creative person differ. When someone says to me, "Tyler, you're in charge of five people, here's a kitchen full of everything you could need to cook a meal, now go cook me a steak and potato dinner, with steamed asparagus, and a cheesecake for dessert." I will find out which of those people grills a steak so tasty even PETA employees want them to barbecue at their company picnics, which one loves grilled vegetables more than their children, who got flunked out of baking college (is that a thing?) because the teachers were threatened by how heavenly their cheesecake taste, and I'll get those people making the dishes they need to make. No problem. If someone were to put me in that same situation, but tell me to cook whatever I felt like, my response would probably be, "Well I hope you like grilled cheese and Top Ramen then."
I'm over simplifying of course, but I hope the point is clear. When someone gives me a goal, a direction to go, I have no issues getting there, but if I'm left to myself to decide what that goal should be I'm usually at a bit of a loss.
So why is a creative worker important? Well the best way to solve old problems is with new thinking, and with the speed at which things change these days, especially with technology, I think the guy who can see which direction to go next is probably going to be one of the most valuable assets any company has available. Also, I don't want to work for other people the rest of my life, so I need to figure out how to set objectives and goals for myself too.
The really wonderful thing about this problem though, is that it is totally solvable. I'm convinced that creativity is a skill we all posses, we just need to develop it so that we can use it effectively. To that end, I've been trying to do creativity exercises, like "think of 20 new uses for a brick," which Peter told me about.
So here they are:
1. Hammer
2. Weapon
3. Plate (I know, not ideal, but still possible)
4. Super cool night stand
5. Primitive lock-pick
6. Makeshift weight for working out
7. Counter weight for a pulley system
8. Ruler
9. A little flower pot (I don't know if you guys have ever seen this, but some bricks have silver dollar sized holes in them)
10. Clap two of them together as a signal (The British are coming!)
11. Strap a couple of them on your feet to walk over hot surfaces (I know that if you walked on them for too long the bricks would get hot and cook your feet, but for the short-term, I think it could work)
12. Stop-blocks for a car or trailer
13. You could use different colored bricks to make a wall with a built in mural
14. Super effective spider crusher
15. The Pez in a heavy-duty Pez dispenser
16. Janga, hard mode
17. A place to leave a message (You know, write something nice to the future occupant of your current home, or take the express route and throw it through a window)
18. A somewhat uncomfortable stool
19. Door stop
20. Budget version of a drummer's practice pad
It took me 12 minutes and 38 seconds to come up with that list, and while I admit it's not the best, I'm still pretty proud of it.
Feel free to throw your own "20 new uses for a brick" list into the comments here, or on facebook, or just do it in your head, but at least give it a try. You might be surprised with what you come up with.
I've been teaching one of my professor's sons English once a week to help make a little extra money this semester. My professor wants us to do things that are fun so her son actually enjoys learning a second language, rather than looks at it like the rest of his school work, so we do things like play darts, go for walks, and two weeks ago we were playing with his LEGOs. I was a huge fan of LEGOs when I was a kid, and I think you would be hard pressed to find any person around my age who didn't also enjoy building spaceships, or ancient tombs filled with zombies out of those little bricks. God help you if you ever stepped on one, but short of that, they may very well be the greatest toy known to man. You can choose to follow the directions and make what was originally invisioned for the set, you can mash up the sets and make stuff like an AT-AT from Star Wars with a dinosar head, or you can take the "directions are for pussys" route and start making whatever the hell you like out of all the blocks you have at your disposal.
My professor's son was busy building a pretty sweet space ship while I was asking him about the different colors of the blocks. I, on the other hand, had been kinda picking through the blocks and not really making anything. My young pupil took notice to the fact that, while he was already zooming around the room in his new intergalactic ride, I had nothing of my own, and he asked me "Did you forget how to play with LEGOs?" I tried explaining in Russian that I just didn't know what exactly I wanted to make and he said something to the effect of, "It's really easy! Just think of what you want, and then make it!"
Those words really stuck in my head for the rest of the day, and while I was walking home I had to wonder to myself, "how can I have forgotten how to play with LEGOs? It's one of the easiest, most fun things I can remember from when I was a kid." For the next few days I spent a lot of time wondering why nothing had come to mind while I was staring at those blocks sitting on the ground in front of me, and I found an answer:
I've lost my sense of creativity
The thought had occurred to me that same day, while I was walking home from my professor's home, but at the time I had told myself that it didn't really make sense. I have played the saxophone since I was in the 6th grade, and musicians are creative by default, right? The more I thought about it though, the more it made sense. As a musician, I've always loved playing big band charts. I love the feeling you get when a band grooves together, and it all just works, but, to a large extent, that's a technical skill. It requires some sense of feeling to know how the music should flow, but a lot of it comes down to reading the music sitting in front of you, so you're not really creating anything in the process. Improv, however, has always scared me stiff. The prospect of making something musical out of thin air always made me nervous, and I often did my best to shy away from practicing my improv skills. I would always do just enough to get by, rather than really jumping in balls deep to try, fail, try, fail again, and start to actually get better at the process of creating music.
I want to be able to create, have original ideas and make them a reality, and I found the prospect that I might not be a creative person unacceptable in all honesty. I thought more and more about it, and realized that if I was given an unlimited budget, unlimited time, and a Matrix like ability to download any skill I didn't already posses, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I mean sure, I would probably throw a few raging parties, go travel a bunch, use skills other people had spent lifetimes developing to win bets in bars, and eat in all the most expensive restaurants I could find wearing hand-tailored clothes, but that's really just the fantasies of a 20 something college student. If it really came down to it, and I had the resources to do anything I wanted to do with my life, I wouldn't know what I would want to do.
So I started a list.
"The list of things I would do in my life if time, money, and skill were not a factor" currently includes 52 different goals ranging from "fly a jet pack" to "become a published author," and I'm trying to add more as often as possible. When I get up in the morning, I try to imagine what baby steps I'm going to take that day to reach one of those goals, whether it's "go to class" (Learn to speak Russian fluently) or "do push ups" (Bench over 100% of my body weight), or anything else, and I think that it has been a pretty healthy exercise thus far, and has helped me open my own eyes to the kinds of things I want in life, and what I need to do to achieve those goals.
I reached out to one of my former employers, friends, and creative minds in Colorado, Kelly, to ask for her help in regaining that child-like creative power, and both she and her husband Peter have been very helpful. While talking with Peter I was able to find a reason beyond "because I wanna!" to try and rekindle my creative spark, and that's for becoming a better worker.
As we were talking about the importance of creativity in the workplace I thought of myself sitting in a room during an interview and hearing one of those stock questions, "What is your greatest weakness?"Not to seem like I think I'm the greatest guy on earth (although, I am pretty cool), but I've never had a good answer to this question. I'm punctual, smart, good under pressure, I work well alone and in groups, and I can solve problems creatively. I've come to realize something though, being a creative problem solver, and being a creative person are not the same thing. When I have been given a goal, an end point, I can find all sorts of ways to reach that point, and I'm pretty good at leading groups to reach goals too, but I struggle when I try to decide what that end point should be myself, and that's where being a creative problem solver and a creative person differ. When someone says to me, "Tyler, you're in charge of five people, here's a kitchen full of everything you could need to cook a meal, now go cook me a steak and potato dinner, with steamed asparagus, and a cheesecake for dessert." I will find out which of those people grills a steak so tasty even PETA employees want them to barbecue at their company picnics, which one loves grilled vegetables more than their children, who got flunked out of baking college (is that a thing?) because the teachers were threatened by how heavenly their cheesecake taste, and I'll get those people making the dishes they need to make. No problem. If someone were to put me in that same situation, but tell me to cook whatever I felt like, my response would probably be, "Well I hope you like grilled cheese and Top Ramen then."
I'm over simplifying of course, but I hope the point is clear. When someone gives me a goal, a direction to go, I have no issues getting there, but if I'm left to myself to decide what that goal should be I'm usually at a bit of a loss.
So why is a creative worker important? Well the best way to solve old problems is with new thinking, and with the speed at which things change these days, especially with technology, I think the guy who can see which direction to go next is probably going to be one of the most valuable assets any company has available. Also, I don't want to work for other people the rest of my life, so I need to figure out how to set objectives and goals for myself too.
The really wonderful thing about this problem though, is that it is totally solvable. I'm convinced that creativity is a skill we all posses, we just need to develop it so that we can use it effectively. To that end, I've been trying to do creativity exercises, like "think of 20 new uses for a brick," which Peter told me about.
So here they are:
1. Hammer
2. Weapon
3. Plate (I know, not ideal, but still possible)
4. Super cool night stand
5. Primitive lock-pick
6. Makeshift weight for working out
7. Counter weight for a pulley system
8. Ruler
9. A little flower pot (I don't know if you guys have ever seen this, but some bricks have silver dollar sized holes in them)
10. Clap two of them together as a signal (The British are coming!)
11. Strap a couple of them on your feet to walk over hot surfaces (I know that if you walked on them for too long the bricks would get hot and cook your feet, but for the short-term, I think it could work)
12. Stop-blocks for a car or trailer
13. You could use different colored bricks to make a wall with a built in mural
14. Super effective spider crusher
15. The Pez in a heavy-duty Pez dispenser
16. Janga, hard mode
17. A place to leave a message (You know, write something nice to the future occupant of your current home, or take the express route and throw it through a window)
18. A somewhat uncomfortable stool
19. Door stop
20. Budget version of a drummer's practice pad
It took me 12 minutes and 38 seconds to come up with that list, and while I admit it's not the best, I'm still pretty proud of it.
Feel free to throw your own "20 new uses for a brick" list into the comments here, or on facebook, or just do it in your head, but at least give it a try. You might be surprised with what you come up with.
