I ordered my tea and settled in my favorite writing corner at Three Friends Coffeehouse. True to last week’s title, I was salivating post my next blog.
Serendipity! Deborah walked in with her guide dog. While exchanging Good Morning! ‘s I discovered Deborah is law school graduate with a passion for legal issues that impact the blind community.
So, as the conversation progressed, I asked about her experience of the availability of legal treatises in Braille. Hey! Inquiring minds want to know.
She chuckled and added a dismissive, “My Braille skills suck!”
Conversation then turned to speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies. Duh! Why didn’t I see that one coming?
It was the perfect set up for today’s question.
Do you believe in hire education?
No that is not a typo! Higher education teaches you answers. Hire education teaches you to ask questions. A Creative’s best leadership skill is the commitment to be a lifelong learner!
A few years ago I realized that nearly everything I do at work involves skills I learned after I left college. Digital audio. Computers. “The cloud.” FaceBook. Social networking/marketing. Even ancient technology like MIDI was invented after I graduated (and no! you may not go there!). It is amazing to stop and think how many regular features of both my work and my daily life didn’t exist ten years ago.
(Aside: Yesterday, I saw a clip of a recent interview with the ‘N Sync. The host played a file clip from a 1999 interview. There, on camera, ‘N Sync discussed the Internet and it’s potential to change communication and the entertainment industry. LOL. ROFL.)
A Creative ask questions.
Lots of questions! Leonardo DaVinci had notebook after notebook of questions? Answers to questions served as springboards for more questions.
Yesterday, my friend Kyle and I spent four hours recording five minutes of video for my new series, “77-Second Piano.” Last night, I spent three hours trying to bring three camera angles into one editing suite, line up the audio, add titles, and find the “magic” to finalize the first video. I went to bed with nothing to show for my efforts.
I have not failed.
I just found 10,000 ways it won’t work.
–Thomas Edison.
Failure? Hardly. Today, I approach my afternoon a bit wiser. Will my software allow me to match audio tracks before I edit the video feed? Can I do cutaways with this software? Last night was a tutorial on the lexicon of video editors. Today I will ask better questions, based on answers to last night’s questions.
All together, it is a lesson affirmed by KevMoKeys three years ago—
No creative endeavor is ever wasted.
Tenacity counts. As a life-long learner, I love it when a task takes too long, and requires too much on-the-job training. Each new skill learned opens my eyes to new possibilities.
As A Creative, what challenge do you face today?
What questions will you ask of your questions
to help you see your project in a new light?
Embrace your Creative Questioner!