'Passionately Curious'

Creativity is a key element for fostering innovation and growth. Creativity, this concept of thinking beyond walls and lines and boundaries and the known, has been the root cause of discoveries (accident or not) that have changed the world, think: penicillin, Columbus, Steve Jobs, just to name a few. Even on the smaller scale, creativity means thinking differently and embracing the unknown which produces change, and change is the underlying current of mankind's evolution.

An experience that stands out to me where I was creative was when I did a Rube Goldberg project for a physics class. I did the project with my really good friend Matt and we had certain specifications like our project had to include things like static/kinetic energy, fluids, springs, and physics-y stuff that I have completely forgotten about, and the main goal of the project was that it had to involve complicated steps to perform a simple task-ours was turing on a fan. We had fun experimenting with fire, mouse traps, marbles, water-bottles, and dominos.

It has been one of my guiding principles to approach life with this infinite curiosity, to never stop wondering and questioning. Creativity is about expanding that curiosity to push the limits of the known into the unknown and break the predictability. The workshop confirmed my perspective on creativity in the sense that an inquiring mind is an intelligent mind, but it also reminded me of the importance (and possibly relief) in reverting back to the child-esque spirit of adventure. There is this childlike quality in having persistence in trial and error, no matter how many errors there are or trials there may be. When children play, they don't have this overhanging threat of failure above them, but I feel like as we get older, that threat of failure becomes more pronounced. A good example is Caine from Caine's Arcade. Caine's unwavering spirit for his arcade is truly exemplary because even though the critical and analytical mind would say that the arcade would not get that many customers, he still believed in it. Every weekend like clockwork, he would set up his arcade and wait for customers. Even though his dad was supportive and tried to help him set realistic expectations, Caine never stopped believing and was never discouraged.

Creativity is thinking differently, and with thinking differently comes unknown results and unpredictability. Sometimes, people are wary of that because creative solutions don't always result in success. People can be afraid to think out-of-the-box because we don't know what will happen when we do. A key takeaway from this workshop is to not only be imaginative and creative, but also persistent in action, no matter the result or surrounding opinions. Caine is inspiring, and I want to instill in my life his unwavering spirit of adventure. I had so much fun building a mini-golf hole with Mike and Blair. There was this sense of silly humor as we created and constructed our course, and I want to adopt this care-free attitude in my daily life. This care-free attitude and adventurous spirit can also be applied to a certain extent to the current BLF challenge. As the Best Practices team, we can incorporate creativity into our analysis by not just looking at the obvious ways to analyze the data, but also break down the data to in such a way that it would provide a new useful perspective.

In essence, creativity is cultivated from curiosity, thinking and seeing in new and different directions. The world as we know it will undoubtedly end if our thinking became all the same and stagnant. But don't take my word for it, Albert Einstein once said, "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." 

Today's Initiative for Tomorrow's Dreams...Because Today is Almost Over.

Initiative represents the passionate courage and the determined leadership to start and finish a plan of action when no one else will. I firmly believe ‘initiative’ is defined by how every individual has the capacity to make a positive impact, to make opportunities instead of waiting for the opportunities to arise. There can be various situations where initiative can be demonstrated: a person volunteering to do something first when no one else steps up to the plate, when a person takes ownership of their own life/work and doesn't wait to be told from someone else do to something. Initiative makes for a good Area of Focus because taking initiative is a skill and quality that can separate the leaders and the followers. Being able to take initiative represents a sense of confidence and bravery because initiative most often times connotes change. With change is evolution and growth. We have to make our own evolution.

A great example of initiative would be my very good friend's founding of the Her Campus chapter here at Ohio State. Her Campus is a collegiate blog catered for females, and when my friend realized that our campus didn't have one, she took it upon herself to start one. So she applied which consequently led to the founding chapter of Her Campus at OSU. I said her accomplishment in one sentence, but don't underestimate the hours of hard work and determination it took for her to make the site successful. Her 'baby', as she likes to call it, is now fully staffed with writers and has a successful number of readers!

Listening to the Young Alumni panel, I was astounded, inspired and impressed by how they knew what they wanted and so fearlessly sought after it, even if it wasn't on their original path. One changed paths and some just created a new path altogether! It is that bravery and honesty with ones own passions that I want to instill in everything I do in life. As a junior, I am becoming more and more panicked (deep breathes!!) and stressed about what it is that I want to do. I'm excited for my summer internship, but what if I don't like it? What if I do? What if it doesn't work out? (Breathe!!) I know all these hypotheticals are meaningless and should not be stressed over, but there will come a time when I have to evaluate what I want out of life and I'm scared worried that what I want is no longer what I've been working for these past years. What then? With the down economy and the fiscal cliff and global warming and climate change all that, how could I leave a sure thing? How could I leave the safety of a good job for something that has a bigger chance for failure than success? I want to live life hungry in the figurative sense, not literally starving. I'm all for being adventurous, but I don't want to be adventurous and broke.

A takeaway I've learned from all this is that life with passions is about taking those chances. It's about being honest with myself with what I truly want out of life and what I want to achieve. Something I've learned from one of my favorite books of all time, Coelho's The Alchemist, is that the whole world will conspire to help me achieve my truest dream if only I take that chance. And so I will learn to live life not so much without fear, but knowing that fear of failure is better than fear of living a life without passion. Because in the end, everything will be alright. If it's not alright, then it's not the end.