2024 April 16 Being more creative

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me tonight to talk about how to make your solutions a bit more creative and maybe even better aligned with your vision. But first, some background.  Life is pretty much like everything. In my life, for example, nothing is linear to get from here to there. Everything is  a lengthwise journey. It wanders around and I finally get to where I'm going. 

Yesterday, I had a bunch of things I was working on  besides the podcast. I took part of the day off to help write some grant applications for the church. 

This is why I always tell people that I always recommend to always keep learning. Through my community college, we have access to an online course platform called Ed2Go. The courses are taught by real live people, which is neat. Although most of your interaction is via written documentation, it's not really online learning per se. It's not like you're watching videos, but if you learn well from written sources, they're all very pragmatic, hands-on courses.

Some are programming courses and things like that. I find it really nice if you learn well from written stuff. It's really handy because it's awesome. You can always just message with the teacher for feedback. It's nice, but it's not like they have to pay teachers to sit and do real courses all the time.

The other nice part about it is that you can sit and study at your own pace at any time of day or night, then write the teacher and get an answer usually within a few hours if you have a question or something on the homework.

I really like it, and I really recommend to everybody to keep trying to do that sort of stuff, always learning things. I have a few certificates through Ed2Go, and one of the most recent was Introduction to Grant Writing. I knew it would come in handy at some point, and that particular point was now.

So I'm cruising through the first grant, and I'm speaking with someone else about the progress. They suggested we could ask for a grant to develop our side lot into a free community garden.  And I thought, Wow, what a great idea.

We have subsidized housing right behind the church and the nearest real grocery store is on the other side of town. There used to be one across the creek just about a mile or so away, walking distance, but now it's something else. I started looking into the whole concept of community gardens, and in the course of looking through things came across someone I had seen before, Ron Finley, who grew up in South Central LA in a bad part of town, in a complete food desert. Although he's a clothing designer, he says that for him, the soil is his canvas, and the plants are what he creates his images with.

It's estimated that there are 26 million people in the US currently living in a food desert, where it's difficult to get good food within a reasonable distance. In his case, right in LA, it was a 45 minute round trip drive to the nearest store that had apples that weren't covered in pesticides.

It took almost an hour just to get there and get back. Where he lives, he said, people are roughly five times more likely to be obese compared to Beverly Hills, which is only a few miles away. I was watching a TED Talk from him, and he said LA owned over 26 square miles of vacant lots, which he finally convinced them to use--at least some of them--for community gardens. For reference, 26 square miles is over 20 times the size of Central Park in New York City. As he rather wittily points out, that much land is capable of supporting over 724 million tomato plants. 

The moral is that by looking at the vision, which in this case was to provide healthy aid--this is actually the grant requirement, to provide healthy aid to the local community, especially those who struggle financially--suddenly new options became visible. I already had four grant proposal ideas, and they're all still valid.

I'll probably try and submit them all, but some of them were more passive for the recipients, and some of them were longer term. But by not focusing on only my ideas, but rather keeping an open mind and thinking out loud about the vision, talking with someone else, the idea of the community garden came up and it clearly lept  to the front of the pack.

It's just far and away better. Not only is it somewhat less expensive--there'll be some cost because the land needs remediation to be usable--but the community has to be actively involved for it to succeed. So everyone gets to contribute and to literally enjoy the fruits of their success. It also automatically requires cooperation of all the people. It gives the community a common goal. They have to cooperate or else it's not going to succeed and no one's going to win. 

Insofar as our little community online here, the biggest takeaway for me is that by focusing on the vision and not necessarily even the next expected goal, new ideas and opportunities are allowed to arise and bring you further than you had expected. Relatedly, very often, one of the best ways to be creative is to tell or explain or teach someone else what you're working towards.

There's something about explaining or teaching that really engages your mind's creativity. Even if you think you have a really great solution, try to explain it to somebody else, and chances are, you'll end up with something even more amazing than you expected. That's it for the evening. I hope the next time you're thinking about a creative solution, you remember to not get too fixated upon the obvious next goal, but allow your creativity to work, and to work with others. Perhaps it'll bring you to an even higher level than you expected. 

Your homework (always optional) is to think about some recent tasks that you hadn't completed and solved. Reframe it, or perhaps even revisit the idea with someone else and see if a different solution might arise that perhaps is even more aligned with your vision or a little more creative.  Extra points if you take the next task that you're considering doing, and do that same exercise. Write down what seems like one or more good solutions and then casually discuss them with someone else and see if you either end up with a better solution or more confidence than ones you've already discovered. 

That's it for tonight. As always, remember the wars in Ukraine and Israel and Palestine and other places in the world. The weekend was really not a good weekend for many different reasons, from a peace in the world standpoint.  

I also always mention World Central Kitchen at WCK.org. They're currently not operating in Palestine, although they're still in Ukraine. They deliver food that's locally obtained whenever possible. They use local resources to help support the local economy. There are resources that support places in Ukraine at UKR7.com. 

Remember that when you look outside yourself to the rest of the world, it really changes your perspective on the world and your perspective on other people. Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. It changes your whole viewpoint of the world. It really does make a difference. If you can and you're able, please donate to one of the many causes.

Donating doesn't have to be with money, it can be with time. If you don't have the time or the money, even small things make a difference. Say hi to someone in the street, make someone smile, just something to bring a little bit of joy into somebody else's life. It makes a huge difference. 

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along and please hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.