 |
| I love my Mint Chocolate chip ice cream with peanut butter and hot fudge topping. |
Be Creative and Consistent
For all my life I have been a creative. As a child I made
inventions. My first one was an automatic ice cream system. It had cones on a conveyor
belt and tubes of ice cream that dispensed scoops to order. As the customer
ordered, the cone dropped into a hole on a conveyor belt and then the selected
scoops of ice-cream would fall into the cone. The desert would then arrive for
the consumer at the end of the belt. I was always a mint chocolate chip guy
myself but I knew that I had to have chocolate, vanilla and strawberry if I was
going to sell it. I can say I got the bug for inventing because my father was
an inventor and when I did something he liked, he let me know but more importantly
he let other adults know. It was that praise that made me want to create more
As I got older, I found two passions, martial arts and
music. With martial arts, the alphabet is conditioning. The infinite number of punches,
hand strikes, kicks, throws, locks, chokes, movements, and blocks is the alphabet,
grammar and sentences structure of martial arts. The art comes in how you combine these
elements into techniques that allow you to defend yourself or defeat and
assailant. Training the body also trains the mind. To me this was the greatest benefit
as the ability to focus and meditate while in motion and removed weakness from my
body and built my confidence.
Where martial arts gave me an outlet for anger and
creativity, music and writing lyrics gave me a way to express my soul and in
some cases my deepest thoughts that I could not express. Maybe I was too shy or
didn't trust sharing the emotions in a direct sentence. Putting words and ideas
down on paper that expressed what I was thinking about let me express myself
without worrying about what my concern is now, writing both with emotion and
following the standards of grammar that make me come across educated
.
I have other inspirations. In the past I have written books,
created board and card games and role-playing games. Each has an element of
creativity. As a teacher of Marital Arts the creativity of a class was to keep
the classes interesting while hitting core elements of technique. When I taught
how to play guitar, I had to be creative with how I presented the information
and techniques so students felt progress. As a fourth grade teacher, I had to
keep the kids interested in what was in some cases very dry material.
