Brain Storm: Unleashing Your Creative Self

by Don Hahn

We are goal-oriented. We learn to celebrate the completion of a job with pomp and circumstance; the arrival of a product like the iPad is touted with headlines and hyperbole. In all this celebration and marketing, we lose track of the earlier part of the equation: the ideas, materials, and quality that go into the work. This obsession with the end product sets us up for a nasty, lifelong pattern of seemingly endless periods of boredom, stress, and tension while waiting to celebrate, followed by a celebration that is far too short, followed by long periods of boredom, stress, and tension, and so on. Not a fun way to spend one’s life. The process itself is where the treasure of creativity is buried. It’s the feeling you get when you are immersed in a project with your head down, and all of your one billion brain cells are immersed in trying to forge idea, quality, and process into a new creation on a canvas, or in a laboratory, or in a saucepan.