Dear Creative Souls,
Time for a heart to heart conversation.
Yesterday, some of you received my post Why I Started This Blog and it was an accident. It is a year old post and I was adding a pin to it and accidentally reposted it. But sometimes accidents are the best things that happen to us. Reading that post again reminded me of the commitment I made to myself.
In Hindu mythology, life is divided into four age-based stages. The first is called Brahmacharya, which is the first twenty-five years of one’s life which one should devote to learning. One should remain celibate during this period in order to concentrate on learning.
The second is Grihastha, the period to get married, raise a family, fulfill the duties of maintaining a home, educating one’s children, and leading a family and religion centered social life.
The third is Vanaprastha which starts when a person hands over household responsibilities to the next generation and takes an advisory role. It is considered the time to give back to the community and the universe in lieu of all that that one has taken from it.
The fourth is Sannyasa, which is marked by the renunciation of material desires and prejudices and leading a spiritual, peaceful, and simple life.
According to this philosophy, I am in the third stage of my life and I am surprised at the urge I have to give back to the universe. During my life one thing I have taken most from this universe is the knowledge. And it is what I want to give back to the universe too. The knowledge I have gained so far and the knowledge I continue to gain.
This website is my platform to be able to do that. Writing is my medium and studying creativity is my passion. I am sharing as I am learning.
I am not a ‘guru’ in any field, just a ‘forever student.’ But sometimes students are the best teachers because they can teach at a beginner level. It is very difficult for experts to bring themselves down to the level of their students because their minds have expanded to a much higher level.
Whereas, ‘student teachers‘ are at the beginning level. They have learned something recently and know extactly how to communicate that. They know where the pitfalls are and what to do when the going gets tough. Because they have just gone through that themselves. And they share their learnings with the enthusiasm of a novice. This is where I stand. A really ‘excited’ novice.
When I thought about sharing these thoughts with you this morning I was hesitating. Will I be making myself vulnerable? Shouldn’t I be establishing myself as an authority on ‘creativity’ and ‘writing’ if I am writing about these topics constantly on my blog?
Call it serendipity when today morning, I came across a video by Tony Robbins where he and Dean Graziosi talk about how the face of teaching is going to change in the next twenty-five years. That there will be more and more of ‘student-teachers’ sharing their knowledge as more people prefer to learn from them rather than an expert.
I found it to be true from my own experience. I follow a lot of blogs and listen to a number of videos where people like me, have learned a skill and share how they learned it. I want to know their process and want to figure out how can I use it to learn it myself.
The experts talk from a different level, and I feel I can’t reach their level. But a beginner talks to me in my language and give me hope that I can reach there too. She shares her mistakes and warns me against the pitfalls. I love her for her honesty. And I trust her more than the expert. Nothing against the expert but he is too far above in the sky.
Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi shared that Forbes is predicting that the knowledge industry which is currently 355-million-dollars-a-day industry and is going to be a billion-dollar-a-day industry by 2025. And the ‘student-teachers are going to be at the forefront of it because the current model of classroom learning is outdated. I have linked the video below in case you are interested in viewing it.
I wanted to share another thing. Earlier in the post, I mentioned I was adding a pin to my post Why I Started This Blog when I accidentally reposted it. There is a story behind it.
A few days ago I came up with this idea to make a visual aid to share the creativity and writing tips I have been writing about in my posts. I was becoming increasingly aware that the key messages are getting lost in lots of text. So I decided to make ‘pins’ of the ‘tips’ and share them on Pinterest. I also decided to sprinkle them in the previous posts as a ‘take-home’ message. This is what I was doing with the first pin I created of the series when Why I Started This Blog got accidentally reposted. Now I think it is not such a bad idea and perhaps I should repost some of the posts as I include pins in them.
Here is my first Unleash Your Creativity Tip #1:
Pint them to your Pinterest board and to collect them all subscribe to my email list below.