FAILURE + STRESS = CREATIVITY BY RACHEL VAN FLEET

Have you ever had a moment in life where you felt like everything was going horribly? Maybe you’re not doing so good in your classes, you’re in a fight with someone important to you, your roommates won’t wash their dishes, and the list goes on. How in the world do we deal with this?

The answer is creativity. That might seem strange to some because before I took this class, I thought creativity meant being artsy and thinking outside the box. In a way, it does mean those things, however I’ve now come to realize it means more. Creativity is a mindset. It’s about asking the QBQs and being okay with ambiguity. It’s about finding the second right answer, then the third, then the fourth.

I’ve been working on adopting this mindset into my every day life. I carry a journal with my bug list and my QBQs, I try to eat the frog every morning, and I work every day to embrace ambiguity (not always successfully). However, this failure is a huge part of creativity. I’m slowly learning to celebrate my failures, understand what needs to be fixed, try again, fail again, and repeat. Yes, failing stresses me out more than anything, but that’s the point isn’t it? After all, what’s creativity without a little stress?