WALL STANDS: A GUIDE TO LIFE BY THEODORE MUSCHANY

Just to highlight a few of my family’s accomplishments:

2 startup entrepreneurs

2 professional artists

1 renowned florist

1 patent owner

1 Quad-linguist

1 college student who paid for their entire education by selling watercolors

1 very confused boy who doesn’t have a clue of what creativity actually is.

I have struggled with the thought of “being creative” ever since I was the dashing young heartthrob on the bottom-right of the included photo.

One time my dad and I were trying to figure out how to manipulate blueprints. We were building a log cabin from scratch when we realized we had built the first half wrong and now needed to get “creative” to fix our mistake.  I liked to let my dad do the creative thinking, because he was a startup entrepreneur and I was the only one in my family who wasn’t good at art.

Then my dad (at 50 years old and not the best shape) started climbing the cabin and standing on the unfinished wall.  He said he was looking at it from a new perspective.  I said he was crazy.

I slowly came to realize that creativity is not being good with your hands or inventing something that makes a lot of money.  It is looking at things in a new way.  It is being OK with people thinking you are dumb for climbing on top of a wall.  It is doing something that can’t be done the normal way.  It is better than the normal way.