Creativity meets Tech. Why we need both our left and right brain.
I played with the vacuum cleaner as a child rather than G.I. Joes and I have two degrees in engineering. If that doesn’t tell tell you what side of my brain I have focused on most of my life, I’m not sure what will.
If you were not aware, the left side of the brain is our logical and analytical thinking part of our brain. It controls how good we are at math, science, and critical thinging. Conversly, the right side of the brain is our creative and imaginative part of our brain. For the first 30 years of my life, I think I focused mostly on the left side of my own brain.
I was good a physics, I studied engineering, and I wrote software. It doesn’t get much more logical than that. Because of the logical skills that had developed in my left brain, I tended to excel at these skills that involved a lot of technology. I could program, I could understand engineering systems, and I could debug and solve many technical problems. Perfect match for an engineer right? Well it was, except for the second half of the skills I needed to succeed at life.
The problem was I tended to struggle with the skills that my right brain controls. I struggled with social interaction (especially at in larger groups), I struggled with thinking outside of the box, and I struggled with being open-minded about different doing things differently.
I can’t say I ignored my right brain completely, I did buy a camera at the age of 16 and I played saxophone in the marching band for 8 years of my life. So while I did develop a bit of the creative side, my early education definitely focused more on the development of my logical skills.
The shift to start developing the skills controlled by my right brain, the creative side, didn’t actually begin until the last couple of years when I started traveling around the world.
The start was booking a flight to Cartegena, Columbia and boarding the Pullmantur Monarch for my first Nomad Cruise. During this cruise, something switched. I started seeing people using social media, photography and videography to help run their businesses and pursue their passion. I started seeing people living their life differently than the standard model. And I started learning new things every day.
Over that first summer, the summer of 2016, I developed my photography skills to share my experiences with friends back home. And that began my journey to develop the right brain. I became more creative, I learned how to produce videos, and I started thinking outside the box.
This turned another switch on in my brain too. I think developing the creative skills also started improving my social skills. I became more comfortable around people and my social skills, I had more to talk about with people.
But this is what I really want you to take away from this concept. Once I started to develop my right brain and all those creative skills; these new skills also started benefiting the logical part of my life. I was able to think of new ideas to apply my technical skills, I actually build a new software product because of it!
But it’s not just about the new product ideas that can arise because of this concept. It’s also that more business will happen because of it. The more you are able to be social and interact with others, the more you will be able to also succeed in business. Because if people trust you, they will also want to work with you.
This concept has added a new career into my life, photography. And as I have begun to transform that into a business, it has still helped other aspects of my life by giving me ideas to use my technical and logical part of my brain.
So as we teach our children how to enter this world, let’s not forget to teach them that creativity is important. That we can’t forget the arts, because that’s where the true innovation comes from, the technical side is just the way to implement the creative side.
