Let Creativity Go Through the Fear

My partner of Parallel magazine said she felt pretty bad since we both did not publish anything on the third week. I told her I will make it up this week. So I sat down, sip some coffee and start writing another article. It is not about something I created related to art and tech, but it is a story behind Parallel.

I came up with the idea of doing a magazine when I found printing out a magazine is fairly cheap these days, so I want to write something and print it out just for myself. I told it to my friend who also want to keep creating things. She thought it would become a good habit to encourage ourselves keep creating things and thinking about the things we created.

For this reason we starts this project. No need to ask for permission, no need to seek audience, no need to put pressure on the shoulder. As long as we want to express, we can keep doing this.

Sometimes we are afraid of creating, because we didn’t see it bring us any direct physical value, or afraid to create something ugly, so we stop. But as far as I know, Picasso made 50,000 works, Mozart composed over 600 pieces and Charles Schulz made 17,897 Charlie Brown strips. Many of them didn’t bring that much physical value to them. It doesn’t matter. The joy of creating things is already the most valuable thing I discovered in my life. And if you look into some masters’ earlier time work, most of them are ugly too. As I believed, creativity is not a gift given to you when you are born, curiosity is. Creativity is a habit that you need to practice and practice to solve your curiosity. Great work came from hours and hours practice. I am not good at English, in speaking and writing, I used to try to avoid it. But later on I learned it is just because I was not born in a place speaking English, that is not my problem. But if I avoid practicing it I will never be good at it, and it is my problem. Actually I can still remember the first day I was in U.S. the person working at the ISS was making fun of my bad pronunciations and thought I wouldn’t be able to understand what she was talking about. Now people from different countries told me I am a good talker. It is quite unbelievable. Let your creativity go through the fear. Artists are just some people that are willing to go further and bold enough to execute it.

Also, do not let any public relationship drives you. Do it as long as you enjoy it. Stop if you feel tired.