A while back I was watching “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King”. One of the characters was riding her horse back to her village and the town was so beautiful. It reminded me of the creative things I used to do at my old job.
I worked in a media team for a nonprofit and we even created a creativity room for brainstorming and developing projects. We painted it a bright yellow and put up big whiteboards all over the place and put up funky stuff on the walls, too. It was a neat place to be able to come up with ideas.
It’s been interesting to work on this print project over the last couple of weeks. I haven’t worked on one for a long time. This thing is about 130 pages long for a conference coming up for one of my clients. And there’s a lot of detailed things that have to be done and it’s not the most exciting thing in the world. But it has been good to feel like I’m getting something accomplished and also helping a client.
I feel motivated when I get something done, even if it is just the print book of results from some surveys. I formatted it in an interesting way and came up with some creative ideas to greatly improve the book from last year. And they’ll be able to use this as a great foundation for next year’s book rather than reinventing the wheel next year.
Another thing I got to do today was to develop a concept for the header on a website that was promoting my client’s product. I design it in Photoshop and it came out good. I’m not the greatest designer in the world but doing something creative was motivating to me.
I felt like I’ve settled over the last several years in my business regarding creativity. One of the dangers of getting so busy with my business is that you don’t get to pause and come up with creative ideas and new approaches to solutions for problems. I describe it as being nibbled to death. I keep getting nibbled to death by phone calls from this person and that person, fixing this and that.
PRINCIPLE:
So you really don’t have to settle when it comes to creativity. But you do need to make plans. You do need to give yourself time to breathe and think about different directions. You need to also look for jobs and projects where you can use your creativity, use your strengths, and generate ideas. That way you aren’t settling and aren’t dying on the vine. you’re coming up with new ideas and helping people.