'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."