A Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity discussion topic

Copyright 2008 by K. Ferlic,   All Rights Reserved

Whenever we set out to do anything, there is always the possibility of failing to achieve what we set out to do for whatever reason. Many fear failure and fear of making a mistake. Yet, in a true creative endeavor there are no mistakes. There are only learning experiences as to what does and doesn’t work. Failure and mistakes are only made in comparison to some standard of comparison or expectation.

We need to understand, relative to a true creative endeavor, we really can’t do anything wrong. There are only learning experiences and some ways are just more or less efficient than others. Life is about experiencing and everything we do is an experience. It is we who judge things as successful and not successful, when in most cases, some things are only more efficient than others.

We judge failure, or not meeting the imposed expectation or outcome, as something to be avoided. However, in a creative endeavor, we don’t know if what we try will work until we try it. Failure is no more than learning what doesn’t work and therefore each failure can really be seen as a success. The difficulty only arises because we put an expectation on how fast or what particular information we think we need to know to be successful. We forget that all the failures we have before being successful only give us the minimum set of experience and information we need to know to be successful.

Another way of saying it is, we don’t know how to be successful unless we know how to be unsuccessful. It is only when we don’t pay attention to why we failed as we defined failure that we can judge our-self as unsuccessful. It is only when we do the same thing over and over again and it continues not to work that we say are wasting our time. There is an old saying, "A person learns from their mistakes, a wise person learns from the mistakes of others, a fool never learns." It is only when we don’t learn from not being successful that is at issue.

We need not fear failure for in our failure we can understand why we were not successful and we are only obtaining the minimum set of experience and amount of information that we need to have to be successful. As a teacher, the author routinely and intentionally put his students in a situation where he knew they would fail and couldn’t succeed until they knew and experientially understood the minimum information. Each challenge was designed to ensure the foundation was strong. The students were routinely told them, "Do not feel embarrassed: I want you to make your mistakes in front of me so I can see what you do wrong and we can correct it, so, when I am not there, you will not make the mistake." But a teacher is different than one who assists in a creative endeavor.

The teacher is one who is there to see and observe where the student makes their mistakes. Teaching is about learning something in particular and the standard of comparison is what is to be learned. Creativity is different. The one who assists, like a rainmaker, is not there to impart what they think the individual needs to know. They are there to observe and give the individual what the individual demonstrates they do not have, but needs to have to become who they were meant to become or desire to become. This is one reason why our enculturated way of teaching is so inefficient and poor at producing effective creators and individual who understand how to live their truth. We tend to give what we think the person needs, rather than watching and giving only what they do not have that is not allowing them to become what they need to become, not what we think they should become.

Relative to teaching and individual how to become a conscious creator, there is much a teacher can give, but the question is, "What does the student need?" If there is a passion in the student, the teacher needs to feed that passion. If there is no passion, the teacher needs to understand why there is no passion. The teacher may need to look and see if the subject they are to teach or draw out of the student is within the nature of the student. The student may not need the teacher because the subject is not something that is within the nature of the life experiences the student is to have to meet the intention for our life.

We assume there is a minimum set of information that everyone needs. But in reality we all have a different set of minimum needs. There may be a minimum set of information society thinks we need but that minimum set has nothing to do with want we need to meet the intention for our life. If we learn from our mistakes and failures we will only experience that which we need to learn before we have what we need. There is really no failure, there is only learning what we need to be successful.

If we feel we are failing or a failure, we need to look at our expectations and see where they came from. Are they from within us and based on the true needs for our heart, or have we assumed something from outside ourselves as our success criteria. Only we can decide. We need to look carefully. If we do not have a passion for what it is we are trying to do, then look to see why there is no passion. There will be a reason and one reason may be that the subject in question is not of our nature and not needed for the life experience we came to have.

There is a story which helps to show how perceived failure is only the minimum information one needs to become successful. There is a solvent/lubricant on the commercial market called WD-40. From the author’s understanding WD-40 stand for "Water Displacement Formula #40." As the story goes, during the 1950's there was the need for a solvent to be sprayed on electronic components used in space crafts and satellites that would displace water. One wanted to displace the water and provide an impenetrable-to-water protective layer so that corrosion of the electronic components would not occur. So the challenge was to find a chemical compound that would displace water and provide this protective layer. The compound that was eventually found to work was the fortieth formula, i.e., WD-40. Now, that does not mean that the other 39 formulas were failures. They only represent the minimum set of learning that had to occur before one understood what would work.

Given creativity leads us to try and try again till we get what we desire, there is a question which could be asked. The question is, "Is there a question that I could ask and never find the answer or doesn’t have an answer?" The answer is probably not. Either one of two things happen. The first is we expand our understanding until we find the answer. The second is we expand our understanding until we realize that we have outgrown the question or the understand the conditions in which we framed the question was not a proper view in which to ask the question.

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