The quest for creativity

670 words

Creative people can be creative in many ways, like being good at making stories, and drawings, or coming up with interesting new solutions to problems, but is it something you can work on and improve?

First thoughts

I don't consider myself to be particularly arty. I'm not sure that this is because I'm not good at it, but I haven't trained myself to be good at it. My partner Cait is a fantastic artist who can draw pretty much anything very realistically, or create new characters and people from imagination.

Cait insists this is because she draws all the time, rather than some inbuilt skill, and it's annoying for her when people assume she is just naturally good at doing things without trying. That ignores the hard work she put into becoming a talented artist, the many hours of frustration and mistakes that bring out a great piece of work.

Image credit: Cait Meredith, "Ash on his Laptop", 2020

Cait drew this picture of me really quickly and I loved it so much it was my profile picture for almost everything

This story of apparently innate skill not necessarily being true gives me hope that I can become better at web design/painting/music but also that it can help me become a more creative person.

My experience

I don't want to talk about myself too much but this is my blog so I'll give my experiences. I do come up with pretty creative solutions to problems, but often I don't see the need to make big changes because I'm looking too closely at improving what's already there. One good example of this was when Connexin's CTO Will unveiled the new tech stack/architecture for our fibre launch.

The creative approach at Connexin makes us improve

I was very surprised by the new project. I was thinking we would be carrying on the way we were with our old tools, but this was a brand new stack and required a lot of new learning and I now fully believe we're much better for taking that approach. I picked it up pretty quickly and honestly haven't looked back at all. A lot of the fiddly stuff we had had to do is now taken care of and we can focus on making a great experience for our customers and staff.

It was a good reminder not to get too comfortable with the way I'm working and the tools I'm working with. I think it's really important to explore new things to come up with creative ways of solving problems, or you run the risk of using the same tools to do everything.

Creating begets creativity

Over the last few weeks, I've been feeling the motivation to build something awesome. I came up with the unoriginal idea of making a blog and thought it would be better than nothing. I'm actually finding it really interesting to build and design, and it's good practice as well for my web design and architecture skills.

Since I started the blog I've come up with a bunch of ideas for things to build and already started one. I've come to realise that creative work breeds more creative ideas. Originally I had no ideas for what I'd write a blog about, so I just wrote something saying "Hi here's my blog" and now I'm trying to write one article a week with 4 draft ideas waiting if I don't come up with anything else.

I think the real difference is that we do actually have cool ideas on a fairly regular basis, we just need to give room for our brains to convert that into something. If you don't do anything creative you won't think you are because you're not in an environment to do anything about it. If you have an outlet or a project then your "oh that's cool" ideas can come into reality.

To finish

Don't overthink it. If you have an idea, that's awesome, if you don't have one, do something obvious, while you do that you might get another idea or think of something better to do. Being creative is like trying to go to sleep, the more you force it, the more it doesn't happen, but if you put yourself in the state of mind to create, stuff will come to you.