Welcome to unlocking the mind: a series of relaxing self-help guides. 

Today’s Guide: Realizing one’s creative potential: a response to “Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All” by Tom and David Kelly. So please, sit back, relax, and enjoy the tape. 

Okay, so this isn’t actually going to be a self-help guide or guided meditation tape, but I will be responding to a book brimming with helpful tips to uncovering your own creative potential, but before doing so, I wanted to make one disclaimer about my view of the text. 

I appreciate the human-centered approach to creation, or, as the Kellys put it, keeping your end-user in mind. They reinforce time and time again the importance of empathy within the creative process. But by keeping creativity framed as a method for productivity within venture capitalism, it limits the amount of empathy that can be extended through the process. Someone has to make money somewhere. I see this as an inherent flaw in their work; it seeks to be this radical set of ideas--and in some ways it is--but it keeps those ideas within the restrictive framework of markets and the production of capital. 

Now don’t get me wrong, I may not like capitalism, but I see the importance of what Tom and David are doing. Within the economic system as it currently stands, their methods of creativity have the power to do the most good. They’re certain to provide the reader with countless examples of that good, like the Embrace Infant Warmer, a device with the ability to save countless premature born lives. 

Outside of this inherent flaw, the book is radical in its effacing of the idea of natural born creatives. Or rather, by extending that idea to include the entirety of the human race. According to Tom and David: everyone has innate creative potential. 

Think about it, everyday when you go to speak with someone, you’re participating in the act of creation, maneuvering words and sounds into orders that create sentences and communicate ideas. You--and the person or persons responding to you--are creators in that moment. You create ideas in your head and then create sentences to share those ideas. 

To do something as strange as quote Chef Gusteau from the 2007 Disney/Pixar film, Ratatouille, “Everyone can cook.” Or, in this case, create. And not only can they, everyone does. As Tom and David Kelly point out, the power is in the realization. By realizing that I’m a creative person, I allow myself to to tap into and take advantage of that creativity. 

I also enjoy the Kelly’s radical embrace of failure, and their reframing of creative exercises as “experiments,” where failure is the norm. Take the whole dropping the ball scenario, for instance. By familiarizing oneself with failure and subsequently becoming unafraid of it, creativity becomes less daunting. 

As I’ve expressed previously, I’m a person who suffers from terrible anxiety, so some of the tips in this book can really help me out as I continue my life as a creator. For instance, I’m telling myself that this video is an experiment, so I won’t fear failure as much. 

Well, that’s about time. So, as always, thanks for listening. 

We hope you’ve enjoyed this relaxing self-help guide from Unlocking the Mind. Goodbye…