Make what you want

A fundamental principle of being creative is making whatever you want to make. That doesn’t mean not taking paid jobs, you need paid jobs to be able to make what you want. But making sure that when you’re making things in your free time, the five to nine hours, you make the most of it and are making things that you actually want to make.

For instance, I have a waffle machine. It is one of the best things I’ve ever bought. Waffles are easy to make, they taste good (unless you burn them, only done that a few times) and it’s easy to mix them up (eat them plain, with fruit, with syrup). So when I was making waffles one day, I had an idea, why not make a video about it? And I did, for no other reason than I wanted to (and perhaps a little boredom from being home so much these days). Is it the most insightful video I’ve ever made? Absolutely not. Do I like it? Am I proud of it? 100 percent. For this simple video, all I did was grab my camera, shoot it and edit it… in a morning (and as a bonus, I got a meal out of it).

Find something you enjoy and start making, start doing, just have fun. Test out different ideas, different styles of whatever art you make. Release yourself from your own self criticism (because we truly are our harshest critics) and just create. I happen to like cooking, it’s something that’s fun to do. You can experiment, you can follow a recipe, you can combine recipes, you can cook a meal with friends, for friends, by yourself. It is such a versatile skill and something that is great for when you’re with people. Food is a unifier. So why wouldn’t I want to make a videos about how to make simple recipes (perhaps working my way up to more elaborate ones over time) that encourage people to cook and then share what they learned with their friends.

Ultimately when you create some piece of art, be it photography, video, a painting, a poem, a meal (yes, a meal can be art… anything can be art but that is a topic for another blog post) and you share it with the world, you want it to leave an impact. Even if you impact just one person… that makes a project worth it.