Create

I’m 35 and only recently I truly nailed what drives my life — it’s “creation”. When I create something meaningful I feel really great. My creations are not tangible in most cases, like poems, songs, design solutions, new product features, articles, books and blog posts. In general I think creation of anything that lasts is a good way to spend your life.

http://mashable.com/2013/02/13/amazing-minecraft-creations/

Deep immersion into a working process turns off everything around. You suddenly ignore all external sounds, you don’t feel how minutes and even hours passing by, you don’t notice poor lighting and reject timid body requests. Then you wake up and check the result. Maybe it’s not perfect, maybe it’s just a start of something significant, maybe you will throw it away in several days after critical examination, but nevertheless you have a sense of achievement. You’ve just completed a thing that may be a part of your legacy.

Can you write? Can you invent a software that changes people lives? Can you build a house? You never know till you try. Your life passion is not “programmed”, it should be “discovered” via experiments and achievements. Moreover, public recognition in many cases is not a good indicator of your achievements. Your personal feelings do matter. When you achieve something and enjoy the process, it is a good signal that your experiment was successful and you should keep going. When you spent quite a lot of time on, let’s say, quantum physics with no clear results and theoretical constructions bored you to death, maybe you should try something else (or maybe you just have a depression, but it’s curable).

Any startup and any ambitious mature company should hire as many creators as it can. These people are enthusiastic, active and relentless. They are the engine of a company. They keep learning, experiment a lot and failures are just a part of their working process. Every team desperately needs at least one creator, otherwise it will be mediocre at best.

How to discover a creator? It is relatively easy to do. Usually they can have something from the list below:

• Side products (frameworks, apps, whatever)
• Blog, articles, books, whatever
• Hobbies related to creation (painting, robots construction, fancywork)
• They usually like LEGO and Minecraft (this option alone is not 100% proof that a person is a creator)

Consumers are all around. We all consume books, movies, TV shows, cars, food, etc. How many of us transform all these consumed information, experiences and skills into something meaningful? Surprisingly, creators are quite rare. It’s incredibly hard to find one and align his goals with company goals. Sometimes they are not polite and hate everything that blocks or slow downs acts of creation. They will not tolerate political games and bureaucracy. Most attempts to cheat them and exploit them will fail in the long run.

We need to build companies that promote honesty, creation and learning. I’m here to create. You?