indebted to her for raising me and for other reasons. So I’m just giving you a very simple slice of what drives me. But ultimately that’s really what it comes down to.
What are the successful actions that really make creativity happen for you?
Having a good routine. Surrounding yourself with positive people or influences. Identifying the positive things in your life and the negative. Fleshing out your mission statement and what it actually means to you.
The key thing is that you don’t need to be good at everything and you don’t need to tell yourself you’re good at everything, or try to convince yourself or other people. Therefore, when you’re showing your portfolio or you’re sharing your website, don’t try to convince people that you can shoot the action and landscapes and portraits and everything. That’s not needed. You’re hired because you’re a specialist and because you’re the best at what you do. And really that’s what you want to do. You want to hone that skill.
What advice do you have for someone who wants to put more creativity and art into their life?
I’ve always looked at these things as a career path; how do you want to achieve this as a career path? How do you want to do this to build your name and reputation? It’s pretty straightforward: surround yourself with things that inspire you. If you don’t know what inspires you, go out and try new things.
For thousands of years, we have lived outdoors. It’s only been the last couple hundred years that we have been an indoor culture. So deep inside of us, in our most innate self, we are craving to ignite all of our senses. Living indoors shuts off certain parts of your senses. You don’t have to live with those senses because you don’t have to worry about where your food comes from.
So you need to get to a place where you’re using all of those senses. You’re finding out what it is you’re passionate about and that really requires you to experience new things. I can’t express that enough. I think that most of society is a bit too complacent and a bit too looking-for-handouts as opposed to working for one.
How do you add creativity to your life as a parent?
When it comes to adding creativity as a parent, you simply have to realize that your goal as a parent is to foster creativity. For me at least, it’s not really to lead or to instruct or to demonstrate, it’s to foster it, because kids are born with it. You don’t need to teach them how to be creative, you don’t have to teach them how to be imaginative, you just have to create scenarios where they can do that and let it flourish.
A big part of it is learning how to be hands-off at times and how to create an environment—and nowadays creating that environment might be less screen time and more time creating outdoors, or making your own games or playing theirs. Also when your children do find something that they are passionate about or inspired by, then allowing and supporting that, going all-in with them and letting them really feel the whole thing and experience it. That’s a big benefit that we can provide them as well.
Chapter Two
Know Your Purpose for Creating
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of
daily life off our souls.”
—Pablo Picasso
Before we take a deeper dive into the cycle of creativity, let’s take look at your purpose for adding creativity to your life.
First, let’s look at the definition of “purpose” from the Oxford American Dictionary:
“The reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists.” It is derived from propose “influenced by Latin propositus ‘put or set forth’ and Old French poser ‘to place.’ ”
When you have a purpose, you are placing or setting forth your objective or reason for doing something. It’s as though you’re reaching out and placing in front of you where you want to end up.
Think of the difference between getting into a car to just sort of drive around because you’re bored, compared to driving to the trailhead of a mountain so you can get out and climb it. Now look at the difference in your purpose for each: no real purpose in the first one, in the second you know exactly where you are going and why. You might ask, “What is the purpose for climbing this mountain?” If you ever have, you’ll know the answer instantly: exhilaration coupled with a sense accomplishment that is unmistakable. The bonus is bringing home marvelous stories and photos, adding up to quite a creative package for this purpose.
Having a purpose fires you up; lack of one leaves you lifeless. It’s an on-off switch for life. You’ll notice those times when you’re really motived by a purpose you come more alive and are more creative.
Getting Schooled by Life
My high school experience taught me a lifelong lesson about this. In my junior year, I had the opportunity to attend a prep school in Vermont, which was quite a change from the hippy school I had been going to in the mountains above the San Francisco Bay area. Friends of my family with kids my age were moving back to New England to avoid the drug scene that was raging out of control at the time, and they asked my parents if I might want to go along with them.
That summer I had been living up in the hills with friends and enjoying the essence of the California scene: sleeping under the stars among oak trees; long nights by the campfire and many trips to the Fillmore Auditorium, the iconic music venue in San Francisco that had every big name music group of the day come through its doors, including the Doors.
When my folks asked me to come home for a talk, I was apprehensive what might be in store, given my frequent shenanigans. I was sure it would somehow cut short my Peter Pan existence. But when they asked me if I wanted to go with the other family to attend high school in northern Vermont, I immediately said yes. The charm of New England and the adventure of going to a new part of the country were irresistible.
So, as the summer was ending, I cut my hair and my mom took me to Macys to get outfitted for this new preppy adventure. That was my junior year, which turned out to be the pivotal point of my high school experience. When I arrived, I found the quality of education was far superior to what I had experienced in the free-form school I had been attending.
When the school year ended, I returned to California to attend high school in the fall with over two thousand students. Compared to the prep school with only a few hundred kids, it seemed like an impersonal factory. The school looked and felt like prison to me with its unimaginative cinder block construction, loud class bells, and sterile learning environment. Compounding this was the curriculum for my senior year—essentially what I had just eagerly embraced in Vermont in my junior year. It felt like a massive rehash, and I was getting capital B for bored with trouble on its way from an antsy teenager.
This all added up to a miserable imploding scene for me, and I was ready to do something desperate. I dreamed of the country-wide crisscrossing journeys of Jack Kerouac in On the Road, taking my camera and a backpack and heeding Bruce Springsteen’s compelling command: “We gotta get out while we’re young, ’cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run.”
Sizing
