The Price for Creativity
Things I should have remembered when I was setting my path into creating new things;
After about 8 years, I got my hands on Edward de Bono’s ‘Lateral Thinking’ book today. I started to apply many of its techniques back in 2014, when I was starting my career as a young English teacher, heart-broken, lost and under a lot toxic influence that I have discovered after doing a lot of autopsy on myself.
Today, I was fascinated by the idea of how we have inherited this world to live, walk the earth and consume, after so many generations who have come, understood, loved and seen and departed. What would the world look like in 50 years from now? Reaching this age of mine, these kind of projections into future can now be resonating with reality, but still far-fetched from what we can grasp.
I am not a very shy person, but I have shied away from my own skin, my own norms and my own way of life, to disrupt the ideas that I inherited from a generation that had nothing to offer us, which was even close to glory, this is why, asking the right questions was almost inevitably a mission that I had to respond to, despite knowing what the outcome would look like and here on a December afternoon, with no clouds, with no sound except from a community of strangers, does not seem anywhere close to what I would have imagined when I set on this path 8–10 years ago, so was I wrong?
The idea of being selfish does not bother me. The idea of being part of a delusional generation does not astonish me. But there are those questions that lingered in a corner of my mind for more than a decade, with still no proper answer, so lately I wonder, are these longings for understanding a real craving for truth, or they just serve us to drag our feet along the way, until we have done enough sightseeing and then we just leave, passing a fragment of our knowledge to the next ones, who will sit in our seats.
I am in a part of my path, my career and my life when these words of Martin Luther King Jr., feel more tangible than ever before:
“Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical delvings precipitated the misguided popular mind to make him drink the hemlock?”
“ One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose facing jeering and hostile mobs and the agonising loneliness that characterises the life of the pioneer.”
The main opposing force against, the willingness to do what is ‘right’, in my opinion, is not the code that an ongoing society claims to be of value, but are the senses of self-doubt that one faces, in trials of building a better version of the truth and to this end, the only company that a man can have in facing any kind of injustice, is that of battling day after day, the very simple notion of solitude and making an honest living, in times, when popular opinion does push the boundaries of self-agony into near impossible terms of initiation and self-determination.
This is why, the practice of entrepreneurship has been a key element of my journey, in brief and moderate terms, where I did not see the ‘unique value proposition’ in building products and technical solutions, but as means for communicating, testing and documenting patterns and models and building relationships to serve social impact. Then, it would have helped, if my family had some kind of material inheritance, but there was non, so in my approach to pass on the torch, I did often, try to seek partnerships, with those who are more privileged and I did my bid with utmost honesty, to the best of my recollections.
But, here comes a day, when there are those questions raising again, racing against so many other needs, so many requirements and so many non achievements , according to the common denominator; money, fame and a sense of belonging. I don’t think time has been ever on my side with that regard, but I do not argue, that time could be essentially a great asset to anyone who is willing to step outside of a classroom, in the middle of the course, as he sees the absurdity of the use of some information, for his future. Would it be patting on my own shoulder if I said, I did so?
But what a hefty price.
