The Book: Part I
Free The Idea: How to Get Ideas Out of Your Head and Into the World
Dedicated to everyone who faces their fears and sets their ideas free.
“The power of an idea is not in having it, but the ability to share it with the world.”
- Unknown
(I literally don’t know who said this. If you know, write me at Todd@FreeTheIdea.co)
Just Start
The best, and maybe only advice, you need to become a Creative Person: Just start. Start doing the thing.
I’ve read — okay, tried to read — almost every modern creative self improvement book. From Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life to Quincy Jones’ 12 Notes: On Life and Creativity. I’ve picked up so many over the years because who wouldn’t want to learn from the masters? But the obvious problem with that is that they are masters. And who are us readers? Anything but masters. It’s intimidating to think mere mortals could become a legend (no matter how many montages set to music).
So where do you even start? You just start.
An average person myself, I decided to just start writing a book to help other average people exercise their creativity. Just like you, I didn’t think they could be an author, a singer, musician, painter, photographer, or [insert any other creative pursuit here]. Just start and then you become those things.
Who’s stopping you from just starting?
The brain is a wonderful and terrible place. It’s a magical landscape full of blooming ideas; and the frozen gulag where those ideas stay to die.
Your brain prison is run by a world-class villain. (Even worse than the prison warden character from The Shawshank Redemption.)
And you’re the only one with the keys. With this book, you’ve got even more keys on that jangly ring. And we’re going to unlock each and every idea, now matter how “good, bad, embarrassing, goofy, terrible…”
Because the only thing standing between you and the Creative Person you want to be is you.
So here’s you, me, us getting over that kind of B.S. right now. And we’re just getting started…
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Kid Around
Want to see a higher power at work? Look down. Kids are open to inspiration because they’re seeing everything for the first time. Their new world is literally full of wonder. Kids are bewondered not just by what the world is, but why it is. From “Why is the sky blue?” to “Why can’t I eat my boogers?”
Why would us worldly-wise adults find it hard, even impossible to make, create, or invent? Because we’ve forgotten how to be fearless.
We’ve all heard the story: A teacher asks their kindergarten class, “Who is an artist?” All the kids raise their hands. She asks them who’s a singer, actor, musician, or dancer? All the hands stay up. A teacher asks a 12th grade class the same questions: Only a few hands go up.
In the 1960s, NASA and the Office of Economic Opportunity embarked on a study to find ‘genius level’ people for government agencies to employ. Unfortunately, the study found that the number of creative geniuses dropped off steeply after just five years of age (and that people who were considered “imaginative” were too young to hire). This study might explain why the average age of the people in Mission Control during the Apollo launch was 27.
Not only are kids unafraid to be imaginative problem-solvers, but they are constantly encouraged (by adults) to express themselves in every way. Yet us adults can’t encourage ourselves? Or worse: we actively discourage ourselves through savage self-judgement? We’d never do that to a kid.
It comes down to this: All the creativity and imagination we see in the world is only a tiny percentage of what it could be. What would the world look like if more of us got over our fears and freed our ideas?
So be a kid again. Forget your pre-conceived notions of the world around you and yourself. You are a Creative Person. Now let’s go scare the sh!t out of ourselves…
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Go to THE BOOK: PART 2