Socien's Blog

If we all did the things we are capable of doing we would astound ourselves.

Thomas Edison.

Where else to look for words relating to improvement, potential, creativity and imagination? Edison is known for many inventions including the microphone, phonography, incandescent electric light and kinetoscope. An inventor is a person who takes unnecessary numerous trials, some that will never make it to us the masses, when coming up with a single invention. Imagination and improvement are at the core of what an inventor can accomplish and be capable of.

Creativity and Imagination

Creativity is like water. It flows away if not contained. One way to contain creativity is to develop a superstrured guide to your path, that is not only a guide but a core part of the path itself; with your expectations of what you may get out of it. That guide is a vision. A vision is capable of containing creativity and avoiding spillages of creativity. (I assume that visionaries are the only people in this world who transfuse expectations and patience, and make this transfusion work).

We have had inventors who came to pass without getting any recognition from us the masses. The problem is not that they lacked resources that could get them to our recognition or knowledge but they lacked a vision and they had nothing at the end. A vision is an abstract roadmap that seeks to tell you the upholder other hundred things to try and fail on before they can become one successful thing. (Building a vision is a capability for the few and takes time and improvement).

In order to rain it takes landscapes, winds of the right direction, moisture and speed, and among others to have wasted much time feeding the skies with the right ingredients. Creativity can rain better following conditions that are not creativity itself. Creativity can knock at your door at your doors because you were wasting time not being creative in the past hours, days and even months, but so wasting time better than any. An inventor can be playful like a baby, and observers who are lucky to know him in his trying times have no choice but to liken his trying times to utter madness.

Allow yourself to be lost like a CEO of a company that is on the verge of collapse who instead of being in the office goes on to spend a day in the nature. There he discover out of a millipede walking on its numerous limps that the company’s portfolio must be diversified. Creativity is a matter of loosing yourself frequently and getting to find yourself more than frequently.

I also have a feeling that creativity is imagination brought into existence. Imagination is the magic of bringing forth a soon-to-be-a-product into your mental mills what must not be in your mental factories. Creativity becomes a process of turning the product into realisable and tangible product. Through imagination we create ideas and ideals of fortification, a way of doing and a way of life, a course and a course of action. Our progress does not only depend on what’s imagined but on the realisation of what’s imagined.

You have to do something when imagine, observe when you do what you have thus imagine and discover when you observe. This you must do if you intend to grow, mature and be more capable. Adele Brookman about imagination recommended, “Use your imagination not to scare yourself to death but to aspire yourself to life”.

Imagination governs the world.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte believed in talent as means to filter who gets to the top or stay under. Is imagination part of talent?

If imagination is not a product of talent it is one of a soothing mindset. People who fail to get their right grip to this imagination, they are either not talented or are not without the right mindset.

Those College Dropouts who started mega companies were not intelligent or talented in imagination. They simply had the right mindset. While we we chasing for jobs that could pay us through certificates, they were chasing for ideas in their minds. It took time for them to get to sell their ideas, but it paid off. While our imaginations wrote high quality research papers and sought means to study well enough to earn distinctions theirs were strictly on finding ways to sell their ground breaking ideas. We became professors and workers. They became billionaires.

If you are to give imagination the right mindset you will be on top of the world.

Improvement and potential

It is a gift (universal to all of us) you have in this life and you must put it into use. It is the ability to improve. An error you and I collectively make is to ignore that ability. We take a look at our capabilities as they are now and conclude on what we are capable of, then decide that it is all we will be capable of.

To improve or to change from worse to better or from worse to worse, obstacles against this change must be eradicated by you within your system of thinking and doing. A change happens when there are a few to nothing of the things that act in a direction opposing it. No! Changes happen when forces for them are more intense than those against them.

Improvement is the most important of the changes that happen at a personal level. It is important to know that we are all capable of bringing this change to our lives, careers and relationships. It is a matter of how each one of us is ready to take it seriously.

To improve now you must have had the potential to improve. Potential is fuel in the tank. All that’s left on your part since you have to do is to step on the gas and do the things you are capable of. Just imagine you pay hundreds of dollars to spend a night at a hotel. The hotel has just calculated that this is the bill for a single night. The hotel is quite sure that you will use the bathrooms, swimming pool and even a telescope on the balcony to star gaze. The bill must cover that so the hotel can keep on maintaining these extra services and pay the staff that tends them. But if you are to never use the telescope, bathroom and other services provided you do so freely.

Potential you have it. Use it. Make a difference. Or you will never have the chance to, once the night is over. You are free to make any difference as you are free not to make any difference. This is the problem. When each one of us has the freedom to do or not to do, all at once and over the same thing, by default it torments us this inclination to go for what’s easy. Tapping into your potential is not as easy as not tapping into your potential. But not tapping into your potential will not take you to a point where you astound yourself, and it will pull you backwards to a zone filled with regrets.

Everyone has the potential. It is only that most potential is reserved and sometimes hidden. The problem is not that your potential and mine is reserved. The problem is the lack of the urge to utilise it. Worse, when the potential is hidden you must find it before you put it into use.

Potential is also diverted. When your potential is diverted, you cannot focus on the right things to improve. To improve on the ability to spot a poor game from addicting ones is an improvement in the life of an addicted gamer (I am also aware that gaming and game development is also a noble profession). That being the case, addiction brings into effect potential diversion as it is good at screeming “remember me” when interupting the planned.

Conclusively:

We humans develop. We change and we each have room for improvement. But improvement takes place out of what has been done worse and stood as a lesson from which the basis of future improvement was well lectured on.

Imagine. Put your imagination into action. Act worse. Imagine better. This is the cycle and the road to more capabilities. Those who are aware of this cycle have the potential to imagine more, act worse and imagine better and repeat the process until they can act better and produce better results. This cycle makes it so that people who have been worse and disadvantaged at the starting line come out alright, astounding themselves at the end.