Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow - whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don’t show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward.

School didn’t prepare us for this. Public education is a relic of the Industrial Age, meant to turn boys and girls into the men and women who would stock the factories and keep progress thrumming along. Factories had little use for creativity or independent thinking. What resulted is a system that drummed the creativity out of most of us: that prizes conformity, linear thinking and standardized testing. We learned how to get the grades we needed. We learned to please. We learned to fear anything that smacked of failure or potential social embarrassment. We learned how to hide our authentic selves so well that some of us lost them altogether.

That’s creativity in a nutshell. A messy tug-of-war with imagination to erase that feeling that nothing really matters anyway.