Creative Things
My best friend/business partner and I spent an afternoon last February watching Seven Years in Tibet and decided that our lives needed to be more awesome. So, we did what all rational mid-20s entrepreneur types in NYC do…
We bought 1-way plane tickets to Istanbul and 3 months later we were on a Russian airline, departing North America for the very first time. What followed our landing at Ataturk International was a 4 month period packed with some of the most incredible experiences of my life. From hitchhiking through Eastern Turkey with people I’ll forever consider best friends to losing my iPhone in a Kosovo bus station to Czech beer at 6am in an old Soviet airliner to finding the home village of my ancestors to stealing Slovenian grapes from the oldest grape wine vine in the world. These experiences have reshaped some of my views on the world, its places and people. But most of all, they have given me a renewed sense of wonder and curiosity.
I’ve always been curious about new things (which is how you end up a liberal arts-educated, former social media strategist, former project manager who becomes a startup co-founder in the world of alumni development and real estate) but I realized that I have a tendency to fall into grooves and coast occasionally.
So, I’ve decided to start pushing myself into more creative outlets and exercises. The first step: learning Tango. Yes, the dance. One of the first things I did when getting back was start volunteering at a dance studio in Manhattan for 5 hours a week in exchange for a few classes. It has been great so far- I’m helping out with some aspects of web presence and marketing, allowing me to explore some of the new tools in local search/marketing online in the middle of the densest commercial region in the country. And, of course, I’m learning how to tango… which has been far more challenging than I’d anticipated.
I’ve discovered that it is incredibly difficult to learn something completely foreign and new from scratch. The last time I learned something totally brand new was a very long time ago and I can practically feel the neurons in my brain forging new pathways. But that is the goal- learn, experience and gain perspective. At the end of the day, creativity drives us to places we haven’t been before, but that is the whole point, isn’t it?
