The other day I was looking through some of my notes and discovered a marketing idea I’d forgotten about. I planned to gather various quotes from my books and pair them with something visual—a photograph I’d bought or shot that reflects the message—to create an ad promoting whichever book contained the quote.
Well, as with many things marketing-related, I started out with good intentions but let it go by the wayside. While such an exercise would be creating something new, it’s not in my wheelhouse of creativity. It felt like business, like marketing (maybe because it is!) and not the fun I usually associate with creativity. If my creative energy was more inspired by visual memes or ads I’d probably have stuck with it. It’s pretty easy for me to stick with writing a book, whether it’s twenty-thousand words or one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand, but evidently not easy to take a few hours to search out the right photo, then blend it together using technology I’m not all that familiar with.
Creativity has a broad umbrella,
one that covers either work or play.
I’m reminded of the many times my husband and I have compared our chosen fields of work. He teaches engineering physics, which includes a lot of things that take more knowledge than I can imagine—hard facts that seem the opposite of creativity. And yet when he’s developing curriculum to teach the principles of design that use the laws of physics, it’s an art to him. That’s his wheelhouse, and he loves it! But it took years of learning to appreciate all of the creative possibilities.
So that brings me to the question of the day, and not just in the creative realm, but for life in general. Do we enjoy working at the things we’re good at, or do we become good at something because we’ve worked at it? Hopefully we get the chance in life to work at something we love, but if the other scenario is true, then maybe we can learn to love something we become good at. Sort of like an arranged marriage in the world of creativity!
May your day be blessed with creativity today. 🙂
