The one college lecture I remember

There was a specific lecture in college in which I both decided on my major,
and also learned a principle I've never forgotten and one that has changed my life for the better.

Let me start by emphasizing that I believe we are all born to create. We are creative beings.
But I think too often we get caught up in the term "creative" as right brained or left brained or artsy or crafty or deep or borderline genius when really, I think it's much more simple than that.
We create every single day. We create in our relationships: we create trust, we create understanding, we create experiences. We create in our jobs, we create in our homes, we create in our social media presence.

Now back to the point. There I was in my intro to marketing class, and the professor asked us to think up a really cool, creative clock: one that's unlike anything we had ever seen before. So I sat, and my mind raced, and I came up with exactly.... nothing. Then he suggested we turn to our partner and create a new, creative clock that was an owl. So many cool ideas started to sprout- it could have wings that spread when it chimed or feathers that shimmered and glowed at the strike of the hour, or any number of cool things.

Then he revealed this simple principle that has changed my life: "Creativity loves constraint". It seems simple enough, but the more I thought about it the more true it became. You see, this principle changed my life because it changed the way I see constraints.

Every time I have a new constraint show up in my life, I try to figure out how that's going to stretch my creativity. How I'm going to make things work within that constraint. Jay and I have only had one car for over two years now, so I started going to the gym at 5am last year to make my schedule work. My schedule got more creative (and hard, but I really really loved that time) to work within the constraint. When Jay and I moved to Utah, we had a budget to buy a house with. Because of that budget, we bought a foreclosure to get a house we really truly loved. We would never have bought the house we did if we could have afforded a nice, new house just like it. I had to be creative to decorate our house on a  budget. I had to walk into DI and look at everything with a creative eye. I have had to learn new skills and new talents and make curtains and shop clearance sales and make old pieces work instead of buying new pieces. If a person wants to stop using foul language (constraint), they have to be creative and find new ways to say things! The list of examples could go on forever.

The moral of the story is we all have constraints. We have time constraints and budget constraints and constraints within our relationships. And it's really easy to look at those as negatives, but this principle taught me that it doesn't have to be that way.

And for good measure, here's Rory and I in our matching unicorn outfits that I made from things I already had on hand plus less than ten dollars in supplies because... can you guess? Constraints. 

So I want to hear what other constraints have forced you to be creative and learn new skills or create something in a different way than you otherwise would have!