So yesterday I was having a lengthy conversation with some friends. They were looking for ways to accomplish some of their goals, and I was having one of those awesome moments of clarity where everything was just lining up, ideas were flowing, the Spirit was moving, God is good. As I left them to drive home, I had a realization, what I was doing for them, I also need to do for me. I have goals I need to meet, dreams I want to bring to reality, people I really want to help and things I am very passionate about. When I look at the resources I have, I feel like I am coming up short and yet my faith tells me there’s a way. So I am setting out.
While money is a distinct need, I don’t ever want to do anything just for the money. I started to pray (my faith needs to always be an element of what I do) and I began to ask myself some questions. “What do I have to offer other people that can help them?” “How can I help other people?” “What do people want/need?” and since there is a financial component to my goals, “What can I do, that people would be willing to pay for, but that would give them much more value than what they paid?”
“What do I have to offer other people that can help them?” As I look over my life and experience, there is one component that comes through over and over again: creativity. Creativity has been my go to gift in virtually every aspect of my life. I saw it in my conversation with my friends yesterday. I saw their dreams and their need and the ideas began to flow. My experience with people has also shown me over and over again that the vast majority of people, even some who show real evidence of creativity manifesting in their lives, believe they are not creative. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage for me. The advantage is that I should be able to easily help people to identify their own creativity. The disadvantage is, people who already think they’re not creative will believe anything I do with creativity is not for them, since they are “not creative.” I had to come up with more.
I couldn’t just do a creativity workshop. I had to look at my other questions. “How can I help other people?” “What do people want/need?” I think most people are really just short on ideas because they have dismissed their own creativity or they are afraid to but themselves out there. People need an idea and the way to implement it and they need someone to help them overcome their fears and encourage them to start. I can do this, but again most people don’t believe they’re creative. I need to overcome that objection. I think I found the way. What is the thing that pretty much all people want? All but the most content people, want a better life. To want it is one thing, to get it is another. How do you get it? You need an idea. You need to get creative. What if I could help people to come up with their own ideas on how to get a better life and develop a plan for bringing that vision to life? EUREKA!
I’ll call it, Create a Better Life: Finding your creativity and putting it to work, building a better life. It will be a day long workshop for people who want to create a better life.
I believe that in the process of putting this together, I will also make the way to accomplish my own goals, so I have decided to share the journey as I put this together. I will be sharing it across my web presences, in the hopes of helping more people. You can follow this on AMOKArts.com, BewareofArtists.org and the flagship for this project dweisscreative.com You’ll also be able to sign up for a newsletter with more information at dweisscreative.com
Because goals work better when you have a deadline, I have decided to steal a page from Dan Miller’s playbook and give myself 48 days to put this together. This means I will create, market and do my first workshop by May 30. It’s going to be a lot of work, so let’s go.
AMOKArts 