12/6/2013 Episode 77: Creativity

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that means. It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. So on my podcast, there’s lots of different things I use as jumping-off points. One of my popular things to do, or one of my favorite things to do, I hope it’s popular, is use articles that I really like that I’ve written as inspiration for podcasts. So today’s podcast is inspired by an article I wrote called Connect the Dots.

So I believe that every person has what they call a subject of passion. That is, there’s just something, some subject, that you just—something about it just makes you want to understand it and makes you just have a passion for learning about it. And that whatever the subject is, it’s just something that means something to you personally, and then just as a life study it’s something that you spend a lot of time and energy trying to understand.

And so Connect the Dots was my article about my study of passion, which is creativity. I am fascinated by creativity and creative thought. And in the article I explained that I think my passion—I’m a creative guy, if this isn’t apparent, I’ve always been very creative ever since I was a little kid, and it was something that always came very easy to me. You know. That even when I was real little I was doing a lot of creative thinking and problem solving, and so from a young age I realized that I was a very creative person.

And there are plusses and minuses. I always talk about that your greatest weakness is your greatest strength pushed too far. And I think one of my greatest strengths is my creativity, I’m a very creative guy, but there’s a downside to that. And the downside is that I can’t turn it off. That the way I think and the way I process, while it helps me greatly when I’m trying to solve something artistically or when I have a creative challenge it’s great, it helps me immensely, but in normal life I can’t turn it off. I can’t not think the way I think.

And you guys that listen to my podcast, I am not the most linear thinker in the sense that I jump around. My brain jumps around. And that is just the way my brain functions. And so as a kid, I wanted to understand it. And I think that I’ve become fascinated to try to understand “What is creativity?” You know, what is it?

And so today, and in my column, if you’ve read it—by the way, after I’m done—whenever I do a podcast based on a column, if you haven’t read the column, I only do podcasts on columns I really think are my strongest columns. What I call my five-star columns. Also, if you don’t know, I rank all my columns, every columns I do… like, the first one’s called “One Hundred and Counting,” “Two Hundred and Counting,” I just did “Six Hundred and Counting” a little while ago. [FULL LIST] I rank all my columns on a scale of one to five, and the fives are the really good ones.

So you ever want to read my archive and don’t read everything, you can go through and read the fives. Now there’s a lot of fives, since I’ve been writing a long time, but if you want to kind of see my best of my best.

Okay, so I started this quest—this journey! To figure out what creativity is. And so the first thing I wanted to figure out was what exactly people mean. Because I was told constantly growing up “Oh, you’re so creative.” Well, what does that mean? What do they mean that I was creative?” So what I realized is, it tended to boil down to four things. That when they were saying I was creative, they were saying one of four things.

Okay, number one: they were saying I had an original idea. “Oh, I hadn’t heard that, that’s an original idea. Oh, you’re very creative.” The second one was I was imaginative. That just—I was able to imagine things that they had never thought of before, and they’re like “Oh, oh wow, that’s very imaginative. Oh, you’re very creative.” The third was I was very good at problem-solving. Meaning that I would very quickly solve problems. And I would find some solution that they hadn’t seen, and people go “Wow, you’re very creative.” And the fourth is, I excelled at finding many ways to use a new idea. Which is I would have an idea, and then I would come up with twenty different ways to use the idea. And people would say “Oh, wow, that’s really creative.”

So you’ve noticed in each case, it was me taking ideas and accessing them but in a different way. I was finding ideas faster, I was using ideas in a different way, I was finding more use for the thing, I was using ideas as a means to problem-solve. But the key was that I was quicker at finding things. And so pretty much the big lesson here is what exactly was creativity?

So I was finding how people were describing me as being creative, so I did some research. And my research was “Okay, what exactly does being creative mean?” There are tons and tons of books written on creativity, and I’ve read most of them. And there’s lots of talks on creativity. A lot of people want to talk about creativity. It’s considered to be a real important thing. People value it, and like “Oh, it’s good to be able to see new ideas” and whatever.

But, when you actually start digging into why are people creative, there’s a lot of dissent. And what you’ll notice is that when people study the topic, they come from very different—people come in from psychology, or from chemistry, or from sociology. You know, that people have a very different vantage point of understanding creativity, and what use of creativity means to them. Because there’s a lot of different ways to make use of creativity. So I did my research, and here’s the universal truths that I found. The things that I found most people agreed with.

Okay. So number one, that there was a tie between creativity and intelligence. Now, it’s a one-way thing. Not every intelligent person is creative, but what they found is the most creative people tended to be intelligent. Now, if you’ve studied intelligence, there actually is not one type of intelligence but rather… I think eight types of intelligence? But there’s a bunch of different types of intelligence.

I think creativity plays into one kind of intelligence, and so I believe that creative people tend to be intelligent, but they tend to be intelligent in a particular way, in a particular area. And in fact, one can even argue that creativity is a kind of intelligence. It might be one of the eight. I have not studied intelligence as much as I’ve studied creativity.

So number two is that creativity tends not to be conscious to its user, meaning that people that are creative know that they’re creative, they know how to be creative, but when you ask them why they’re creative or what do they do to be creative, they don’t really know. If you ask an artist how he came up with an idea, usually artists are like, “Oh, well, I just know.”

I have this issue all the time. I’m very intuitive. For those that know the Jungian, one of the things is N vs. S—Intuitive vs. [Sensing]. Which is “How do you get your information?” And is it “Do you think it through? Do you mentally sort of process it? Or is it a sort of gut feeling? You just kind of have the feeling that something is right?” And I’m super, super intuitive. Meaning that when I’m designing, I just know when I’ve stumbled upon the right thing.

You know, I think about it, I’m not saying I don’t process things, and I believe a lot of intuition is just a lot of core ideas that have been ingrained. The way I explain intuition is if people understand muscle memory, which is if your body just does the same action enough, eventually your body learns how to do it. And you don’t have to consciously think about it anymore. Your body just knows how to do it.

And my metaphor is that I believe intuition is a lot like muscle memory but for the brain. That if you just mentally process enough things a certain way, your brain starts shortcutting and doing it without you having to think about it so much. And so a lot of intuition is kind of mental muscle memory, if you will.

Okay. Creativity tends to have peaks and valleys, which is people are not universally creative. That there is a creativity level, and it can go up and down over time. Why does it go up and down? That can vary very much from individual to individual. In fact, it ties to the next thing, which is most of the studies have shown that creativity is tied to mental state. And what that means is, certain people are more creative in different circumstances.

Now the funny thing is, those aren’t the same circumstances. Some artists, for example, do wonderful work when they’re depressed. Some artists have to be at peace. Some artists have to be angry. That different people sort of find a different place, that that is their place of comfort. But there’s ebbs and valleys that come along with that, and so your level of creativity isn’t the same. There’s peaks and valleys, and usually that is tied to emotional state. Or mental state.

And finally, what they’ve discovered is that people have demonstrated the ability to get stronger at creativity. That it is something that I know a lot of people like to think of creativity as being just this natural quality, and as I get into it I’ll explain why it sort of is. But it’s also something that you can learn and get better at. And that’s an important theme of my podcast today, is that creativity isn’t just something only for the few that have it. Everybody can be creative. Creativity is something that everybody has access to. And I will talk about that.

Okay. So what happens is, growing up I definitely understood that I thought differently than other people. And the way I figured that out—I mean, it’s kind of hard to understand how you do something when you are the only example for yourself of it. Meaning “Well, how I think doesn’t seem weird. Everybody I know of that thinks this way is me, and that seems normal. I don’t know how other people think, I know how I think.

So I spent a little time and energy trying to understand how other people think. I think one of the things that helps me with my job is, I have to design for a lot of people that are not me. And I have to understand what other people enjoy. That if I keep making cards that I enjoy, fine, there’s a subset that are like me, but I need to understand what other people enjoy. So part of that is understanding how other people think. And I got there because I wanted to understand how I thought, and that meant I had to understand how other people thought.

So one of the things I used to do is when I would confuse people, I would try to understand what I was doing that was confusing them. And what I found was, the following scenario happens all the time. I would talk, and someone would go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, how did you get from A to F?” And I was like “Well, A to B, B to C, C to D, D to E, E to F.” And what happened was, I might not have mentioned B or C or E. I mentioned A, I mentioned D, I mentioned F, and like “How did you get there?” And then once I carefully walked through, they’d see my connections, but my connections aren’t apparent.

So anyway, now we get to the crux of things today. What is creativity? Now, there are a lot of different people saying a lot of different things. I’m just giving my personal take on it. And my caveat is, maybe like intelligence there’s a whole bunch of different types of creativity. What I’m talking about is my type of creativity, that’s very possible. But I’m going to give my sense of what I believe creativity is.

So I believe creativity is the ability to take things that your brain has put in different sections and connect them. So let me explain what that means. So I’ve talked about the brain a lot. The brain likes to compartmentalize. Because you have a lot to think about. And your brain goes, “Aah, that’s too much.” The brain can’t handle lots of things. The brain needs a few things.

And so what the brain does is, it makes boxes. And when you come up with an idea, it figures out where it thinks that is relevant. And it sticks it in the appropriate box. So let’s say in your head, you have a box, you know, A B C D E F G. Whatever. So you come up with an idea, the brain goes, “Oh, Box A. Oh, Box D. Oh, Box G.” And what it does is it puts things that are relevant near each other, so that they can commingle with each other.

You know, for example, Box A might be Magic design. And anything my brain thinks is Magic design gets stuck in that box. And now I’m household chores, and my brain goes, “Oh, household chores,” and it sticks it off in the “household chores” box. And then maybe I am reading comic books, and it goes, “Oh, comic books,” and I have my little “comic book” box.

So my brain, what it will do—everybody’s brain is it segments these things and puts them into different places. What I believe creativity is, is the ability to take things that are segmented in different areas and connect them. You know, that normally you connect things that are related, but I believe that creativity is saying “Oh…” for example, let’s say I have a problem with a design. I might have learned something from reading a comic the day before that is in my “comic box” in my brain, and part of being creative is I have the ability to sort of flow over to my comic box and go “Here’s an idea I had yesterday! That might help me.”

And that a lot of people—I think the people that are more creative have a more fluid sense of how to connect things in their brain. And that people in general, their brain kind of makes things very segmented, and that the creative people are the ones that have an easier time swapping things between the boxes in their head. That the ability to be creative is the ability to find connections between things that aren’t normally connected. I’ll say that one more time, because I think it’s very important. Creativity, my theory, is that it’s the ability to take unrelated things and find connections between them.

Okay, why is that definition important? The definition’s important because it will help you understand how to be more creative. Like, one of my lessons today is the following, which is: anybody can be creative, and anybody can be more creative. That it is a skill that’s learnable. It’s not—now, I think some people naturally have an affinity for the skill, I think I do, I think I was creative because my mind naturally leans that direction, but once I learned that’s what I was doing, I was taking steps to try to get better at it. So, from my article I will now give the ten steps how I believe you can be more creative. And I’ll talk a little bit of how these apply to game design.

Number one—or number ten. Counting down, number ten. I talk a lot about a book called “A Whack on the Side of the Head” by Dr. Roger Von Oech. I think that’s how it’s pronounced. He also wrote a follow-up book called “A Kick in the Seat of the Pants” that’s not quite as good as Whack on the Side of the Head, but very much good enough that you should be reading it.

Okay. So if you care about creativity, read that book. I’ve read tons and tons of books on creativity, and that book has shaped me. It’s shaped how I think, it’s shaped how I think about creativity. I list it as my favorite book because it has the biggest impact on me in life. Now, that’s because creativity is my thing, so obviously the book that most inspired how I think about creativity is my favorite book because it’s my subject of passion.

But if you’ve not read the book, you can read it almost in one sitting. What Von Oech did is he was a business seminar person, he went around the country. Still is. He’s alive. Went and he gave this speech to people. And the core of his thing is that anybody can be creative, and the reason people aren’t creative is that there are ten what he called “mental locks.” And the idea is there are things that people do that self-censor themselves, that keep them from being creative. And his whole point is if you understand the ten locks, you’ll recognize when you do them, to stop yourself from not being creative. To stop your creativity.

Awesome book, if you want to be better at creative thought, read the book, he explains things really well, it’s light, it’s fun, his examples are really good, it is an amazing, amazing book. I get no money from the book or anything, I just—it changed my life, it really was an awesome book, I cannot recommend it more highly. Especially if you care about creativity. For sure read it.

Number nine, and this is a gimme for most of my listeners, although I guess maybe I have a few podcast listeners that aren’t Magic players, is play games. Games are a really, really good source of finding connections. Because games put you in situations that you might not be familiar with and make you find answers. It’s one of the reasons, by the way, that I love playing Limited, because I believe Limited forces you to play more cards you aren’t familiar with and make more of these connections. I think Limited has a little bit more than Constructed in Magic. But anyway, I believe game playing is an excellent way to help your creativity.

Number eight. Puzzles! A lot of people think of games and puzzles as being the same thing. But actually they’re very different. Games—one of these days I’ll do a podcast on puzzles. Games are all about creating an experience where everybody’s trying to find their own answer to solve the problem. Where puzzles is you have a problem, and everyone’s trying to find the same answer to the problem. Games and puzzles are opposite in that way.

A puzzle usually has a uniform answer, and the key to solving puzzles is usually breaking through mental logjams. That most puzzles, what they do, is they make you have to figure out something, and a lot of the good ones it sort of takes your brain and makes it work against yourself. Where you assume things and you have to learn to not assume them. And so puzzles are really good at learning how to break mental logjams. Very good at creativity.

Number seven. Read! And when I say read, I don’t just mean books. What I mean is absorb information. It can be on the internet. It can be watching videos. It can be watching movies. The reason this is important is, if you want to get better at finding connections, well one of the things you have to do is just put more things in your head. More information in your head that you can find connections from.

One of the things about designing Magic is the number of times where I had a problem and like the movie I saw the night before, or the book I just read or some article that’s on the internet solved the problem for me, because I go “Oh, that’s an interesting way to think of it. That is a good way to solve my problem.”

Next, talk to others. This is just a corollary of “absorb more information,” but one means—number seven is kind of like “Go and find information,” number six is (???) with other people, in that people are a great source of information. And it’s a good skill of also, I talked about how you need to understand how other people think. How do you do that?

Talk to other people. Ask how they think. People love to talk about themselves. And if you want to understand how other people function, one of the things in my job is how do I understand the other psychographics and how do I understand my player base? I talk to my player base.

The reason I do so much social media—I mean, part of it is I enjoy it, but part of it is I get better at my job the more I understand what my audience is thinking. You know, the reason I love answering questions and interacting with the public is I want to know what you guys think. Because if I learn what you think, it teaches me. “Oh, this was…” like, I’m fascinated to find out concerns people have that I never would have thought of. “Really? That’s a concern? Ooh, why? Why is that a concern?” You know.

I mean, recently for example, Theros came out, and one of the big concerns on my blog was that the card Lightning Strike wasn’t just Searing Spear. There are a lot of reasons it wasn’t behind the scenes, but I’m like “Why? Why are people so concerned?” I did not see that one coming.

And as I dug into it, I learned “Oh, well there’s this thing that we do where we take a card and then functionally make the same version that gets frustrating for people because then they have to go get the new card when they owned the old card already.” And now this particular card was a common, it wasn’t as much a big deal. It represented this larger thing that they really disliked. And I have to be more conscious about, and recognize (???) that “Oh. Well, really the reason they’re upset is a larger problem and I need to understand the larger problem behind it.”

Number five: examine the known. What this one is, I talk about “Take something that you take for granted.” And my example in the article was “Why, when silverware was invented or over the years, why a fork, a spoon and a knife? Why those three items? Why not something else? Why those three?” And if you think about it, you realize that those—well, what do you need to eat? And you start figuring out why those are the way they are.

And that’s good for anything. Why salt and pepper? Why is a chair built the way it’s built? Why is a car built—like, take just the known thing and question it. Don’t assume it, question it. And you’ll find, as you work your way through… it’s like I talked about with my piggybacking podcast, about how once I examined and I talked to the creator of Plants vs. Zombies, “Oh, that’s why plants. Oh, that’s why zombies.” And at first I thought, “Oh, they were funny. Plants/zombies is funny.” No. They had a very strong functional reason to be there. And as you dig into it, you start to explore and learn that.

Next. Appreciate execution. What that means is, when you enjoy something, spend some time and energy trying to figure out why the person who made it made it the way they did. As a writer, one of the exercises they do all the time—like in film school, we had to watch films, and then my writing teacher would ask us “Why is this the first plot point? Why is this the second plot point? Why is this the motivation? Why is this the character arc?” You know, “Why why why? Why did the writers do this? Why did they make these choices?” And as you begin to study that, you start to understand why those choices were made, and it makes it better for you to understand your choices.

Number three. Assume the power to change things lies within you. This is really important. If you believe things are outside of your power, they are. If you believe things are within your power, they are. My big thing today is that creativity is something that every person has the ability to do. And the reason people aren’t creative, and this is Roger Von Oech, obviously, is that they keep themselves from being creative. Anybody can be creative, but if you think you’re not creative then you won’t be. And if you think you are creative than you can be.

And the same thing comes with Magic, by the way. That if you want to be better—a better designer, better player, anything, you have to believe that the power to change comes within you. Because if you believe it doesn’t, then you will not have the ability to change. But if you believe it comes within you, then you can.

Number two. Assume every problem has an answer. And this is an important one. One of the things I talk about is I’m very optimistic. And I think the optimism is an important part of my creativity because I believe that there is an answer. And this is fundamental to the way I design. I always believe there is an answer.

Now, sometimes the answer comes at too high a cost. That doesn’t mean that there’s always an answer that I want to use, but there’s always an answer. And the key for me is to figure out that answer. Figure out the parameters, figure out what my limitations are, and I always go in assuming that there’s an answer, because if you assume there’s an answer you will find an answer.

There’s a lot of power of positive thinking today, but it’s very true. Especially mental stuff. If you assume there’s an answer, you will find an answer. That doesn’t always mean it’s an answer that will be the right answer or will work for you, and usually what will happen is you find an answer and discover that there’s more limitations than you realized walking in. Like “Oh, that is an answer, but okay I have another limitation that I forgot to list.”

Finally, use randomness as a tool problem solver. So this is my big one. I’ve read a lot and lot of books on creative thinking, and all of them basically boil down to this following piece of advice, which is the way the brain works is that you have a neural net path. And your brain, if it doesn’t have a reason to, will go down the same neural net paths every time. Meaning “Oh, here’s a problem, oh yeah, I know how to handle that.”

Your brain—it’s not even that it’s lazy, it just—for example, let’s say I want to pick something up. Well, there’s probably twenty ways to pick something up, but I’ve learned one way how to pick something up. And so I will pick it up that way.

Now, if that way doesn’t work, then I’ll have to find a new way to pick it up. And the brain’s the same way. If some mental processing solves the problem, hey. And the way you work is, you start with the easiest thing. “Hey, does the easiest thing work? No. Does the second-easiest thing work?” And your brain will work its way through.

So now in general, that’s a good thing. That’s a good way to function, it helps you figure out how to do something the fastest and makes it easiest for you, it reduces strain. It’s a good thing. It’s a good process. But when you’re trying to be creative, the problem is, if you take this simple path, you will find the same connections.

This is why when you try to solve a problem, what will happen is eventually you get stymied because you keep coming up with the same answers. Okay, well the way to be creative, and this is the trick that most books will teach you, is use something that forces you to think in a different way. And usually what they use is some kind of randomizer.

And the reason they use a randomizer is, if you pick it, you will still lean toward things that you know. If you’re trying to solve a problem, well if you just rely on your brain, your brain will keep using the easy things and you’ll keep having problems trying to solve it because your brain keeps going to the same places.

But, if you use a randomizer, meaning you force yourself to go to someplace you’ve never gone before. So for example I use this in my article, which is sometimes I’m stumped in designing a card. And I will just give myself a completely artificial guideline. And, by the way, when I made the website, the reason I did theme weeks is the same reason, is I wanted my writers—it’s very hard to come up with something, say “every other week I’m going to give you a starting point.”

And some of my best articles have been from things in which I never would—like one of my best articles of all time, which is called “To Err is Human,” it’s one of my Topical Blends. Where I just said “I’m going to do a crazy thing. My audience is going to give me a Magic topic and another topic, and I’m going to combine them and make an article.” And the article was about my ten biggest design mistakes and girls. Women.

And so I wrote this fun article about my foibles of dating and how it applies to my mistakes in design. And I loved the article. I never, never, never, never would have written the article had I not forced myself into the unknown. And that part of being creative is forcing yourself to say “Hey, I gotta go someplace different. I gotta design a card, okay, today I’m going to design a card inspired by a donut.”

Okay, and now my brain is working differently because I never tried to think of designing a card like a donut. And so I force my neural pathways to go to a new place. I make them work. I make them do something different. And I start to find all sorts of new things.

So that is a secret, by the way. People ask me. So I’m working on my twentieth design. And people are like “Well, how do you come up with new stuff? Twenty designs? At some point, aren’t you just doing the same thing over and over?”

Well, I’ll tell you my trick. My trick is that I make sure that I start each design from a vantage point that I’ve never started before. For example, let’s take Theros. Theros was top-down Greek mythology. I had never done top-down Greek mythology! And so when my design thing was “Look, let’s make Greek mythology a thing,” well I’d never done that before. And all of a sudden I have all these ideas and I’m going down paths I’ve never thought of before.

When I did Ravnica, Ravnica was all about trying to make two-color pairs work, and then Brady came up with the guilds, and like “Oh, that’s awesome, let’s do a guild system,” and I approached it in a way I’d never approached before.

And every single set I’ve done, I always approached it in a way I hadn’t approached before. I gave myself some parameter, some way to think about it, that is different than what I did before. And that that is important. That an important tool for being creative is the discipline to use this tool of forcing yourself to get it from different vantage points. If you want to be creative, don’t do it the way you’ve done it before, try something different.

And that doesn’t mean you can’t use components you’ve used before, but you have to have mixed into it. Even one different thing and a bunch of familiar things will change everything. Like I used to say is, take my Magic deck. I’ve only got to change a couple cards before that Magic deck does some stuff it’s never done before. And if I pick the right cards, it might do radical things different than it’s every done before. You don’t need to change a lot to change everything. That’s one of my quotes.

A final thing, by the way, is if you want to get better at creativity, here’s a fine little exercise you can do. Get some sort of way to randomly pick things. And get two, just different things. Find like—a dictionary’s a fine way to do this. Or maybe it’s flipping through the TV. Whatever. Some randomizer. It doesn’t matter. Some means to get random.

Find two separate, unrelated things. And then find connections between those two things. So for example, I take a bowl of spaghetti and a puppy dog. What does a bowl of spaghetti and a puppy dog have to do with each other? Okay. They’re both warm. They both cause good feelings. They’re both very much loved by somebody. They both can be very messy. They just--*snaps fingers* You want to sort of just think about “How do these things come together?” And the fun thing about it is, don’t just spend thirty seconds on it. Spend five minutes. Really think. Dig deep. Not just the surface things, but dig deep. And every once in a while, like “Oh, puppy and pasta both start with a P and are five letters long.” As you start going deeper, you’ll find different things that you never might have thought of. And everything’s fair game. Everything. You want to talk about the word, you want to talk about the sounds, the smells, anything about it. And what you do is, you force your brain to start thinking that way.

The act of being creative—and if there’s any point I make today is the following, which is within every single person is creativity. Anybody can be creative. The key is having the discipline to look. Read Von Oech’s book. Understand the mental locks. Learn how you stop from being creative, and then just find the opportunity. And that the key to being creative is looking at other places and just going, “How does this other thing that has nothing to do with what I’m thinking about have something to do with what I’m thinking about?”

You know, the pasta and the puppy, fine. Now you’re at work. You have to solve a problem. Take some other problem you solved somewhere else that’s unrelated, and figure out how that problem got solved. Now apply that answer to this answer. Does that work? Can you find answers? Can how you solved another problem help you solve this problem?

And what you’ll find is when you start doing that, when you take a discipline and start training your brain to do that, you will build up an intuition. You will build up a mental muscle memory that will help you do that. And you will find that you can be creative. And I’ve been doing this my whole life, and like I said, the reason I think I’m really creative is partly because naturally my mental processes had a natural inclination, but then I forced it. I made myself always look for things. I never stop when I’m trying to do things. I play games. I do puzzles. I’m constantly mentally challenging myself because I want to sort of think differently.

Now, obviously it led to a job in which that’s my job. I have to be creative every day. And that’s something I love, and it’s something I love about my job is that it does that. But if you want to be more creative, maybe it’s not your job, maybe it’s just a hobby, most of you are game players already, you can fuel that. And that I want you walking away from this podcast saying, “Okay, here’s things I can do, I can be more creative.”

Because one of the most important things, when you talk about writing—one of these days I’ll do a writing podcast. One of the big things about writing is what’s called a takeaway. That a good writer makes a person who reads it, or on a podcast who listens to it, learn something they didn’t know. Not just that they didn’t know, but they’re able to take and apply to their own lives.

So my goal today is to give you guys a takeaway of how you can be creative. Because I believe that creativity is not some foreign, separate thing. It’s something within all of us. It’s something everybody can do.

So anyway, I am now at work, and so I need to end. Hopefully you can see the passion in my voice. I really, really love this topic. If I can make everybody in the world just a little more creative, I feel like I’ve done a good thing in my life. And so that’s why I wanted to do this podcast. I hope people walk away feeling as energized as I am to go “I want to do this. I can be more creative.” Because you can. You can. You can, you can, you can.

Okay. Speaking of being creative, it’s time for me to go be creative, and do what I do. So I wish you guys farewell, thanks for listening to me talk about my topic of passion, but it’s time for me to be making Magic. Talk to you guys next time.