Bought this spontaneously while was very bored. Reading through first chapter and it looks like I’ll have to dig deeper and have to mould this for my personality.
Everyone is a Creator
Chapter emphasises and tries to bring the reader to senses that he is a creator too. I mean, if I am being honest, I am 10% creator, 10% dreamer and 80% consumer. And I think almost everyone is. It’s not a shame to be a consumer, as the world we’re living in forces us to be. And it takes a whole lot of courage to shatter these comfortable walls.
Author defines creativity as a mere act of existing. According to him, any organism with his actions is creating directly or indirectly. Feels good to be generalising but is just full of flaws.
For me, creativity is anything that can inspire someone. A creator is a complicated organism. He can be selfish yet so selfless at the same time. He can be smart but so dumb on other things. I watched a video recently where founder of TigerBettleDB was giving a talk on how to design distributed systems in which he talked about how most of the programmers can be categorised into two: a painter or a sculptor. And it was so intuitive to me, because to me code that looks/feels good is good.
I’ll consider myself an artist when I’ve inspired someone to do something and it’ll most probably my bad code. Until then, i’m just a sparkling struggler.
Tuning in
target is not to create good art but to be in a state that outputs good art.
Beauty really lies in the eyes of the beholder. Perspective matters a lot. If you’ve not heard one of the most mind-blowing commencement speech of all time: This is water. I sincerely insist you to find 20 min from your life and give it a thorough listen. There were lot of prejudices embedded deeply within me due to the conditioning that I received when I was growing up. Finding them was probably harder than eliminating them from my behaviour and thought process.
For starters, I am really liking these short chapters of 3-4 pages. Glanced a little at next page, and that seems like a joke tho, only 1.5 pages long. Most of the book is just empty pages, with a single quote in the middle of the page. And i think, being bored and empty is probably the catalyst of a much larger creative state that ensues afterwards. I used to run from being bored all the time, constantly occupying myself with whatever I could find, reading random books, watching anime/tv shows at 2x, sometimes even skipping episodes to finish a season (yeah, I’m not proud of it).