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by Nathan Coumbe

Fail and fail often

When Thomas Edison was very young, a teacher told his mother that he was “too stupid to learn anything.” By age 10, he had set up his own laboratory in his family’s home. He became a full-time inventor and set up his laboratory at Menlo Park at age 20. He wasn’t stupid; he was simply born into an industrial, standardized system which sought to stifle his creativity, to make him compliant to the system. The teacher was bad at teaching; the system didn’t know how to properly educate a child.

Our educational system frowns upon children who don’t sit still, who ask too many questions, who can’t regurgitate facts on standardized tests. We are taught to be children who sit still, shut up, and absorb the facts and figures being thrown at us, seldom ever learning how to do anything. Thomas Edison, one of the most influential inventors who ever lived, was one of these children. Each of us is one of these children.

“I have never let schooling interfere with my education.”

– Mark Twain

Edison was not only creative, he was also a failure. And that is something for which we should all strive.

Edison tried over 10,000 different ways of creating a light bulb before finally making the one for which he is famous. A reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 10,000 times?”. Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 10,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 10,000 steps.”

Our educational system frowns upon failure, the greatest teacher of all. The lessons we learn from failure stick with us forever and tend to be much more valuable and useful in helping us make better decisions in the future. We are taught that failure, getting the wrong answer, or writing something poorly, is to be avoided at all costs. Yet the only way to get the right answer is to learn what the wrong one is; the only way to learn to write well is to start writing, most of which will be bad in the beginning.

So what?

Our children, our teens, and yes, us as adults as well, have to get used to the idea of trying new things, of failing. The failures of which I am speaking are not fatal – these are failures in creating something new, or trying out a new skill, or seeking a new way of doing things, of giving something to the world when it might not be accepted.

It might not work. So go fail over and over again until you succeed at something. Try new things, make something, start something, give something to the rest of the world. You might fail. And that failure will teach you a lesson. It will be one of the 10,000 steps in the right direction.

Fail and fail often.

by Nathan Coumbe

Debt is killing your creativity

Are you a Creative?

Do you make something for the rest of the world to read, see, hear, or consume? Are you an artist, a musician, an actor, a writer, a blogger, photographer, videographer?

It doesn’t matter what your “art” is – you are a Creative.

I have four words to say to all of my fellow Creatives out there:

GET. OUT. OF. DEBT.

It doesn’t matter if you have a little debt or a lot – it is killing you. It’s a weight holding you down, preventing you from giving your best to the world – and we need your best.

How many of you went to college and racked up a massive amount of student loan debt to complete a degree in the arts? I did. By the time I finished my sophomore year of college, I had racked up $25,000 in student loan debt. Ironically, I was working so much as a freelance musician, teacher, and retail associate that, along with my partial scholarships, I could have paid the other half of my tuition out-of-pocket and keep my living expenses paid (as a matter of fact, when I “woke up” in my junior year, that’s actually what I managed to do, but the damage was already done).

Did you put your instrument, your camera, your computer, or maybe even your art supplies on a credit card? Did you borrow money for a car? I did – two cars, actually, and the first one was somewhere near 30% interest!

It may feel normal, but debt is preventing you from making your greatest contributions to the rest of the world.

Debt is making your career decisions for you.

You didn’t make a bad decision by studying your art or your craft – you simply made a bad decision with money.

How many of you took an 8-5 job after you finished your degree because you had to pay the bills? What opportunities have you turned down over the years because you had the weight of your debts hanging around your neck? How many of you have quit your art because you have to spend so much time making money at a “real job” instead of creating?

What would you do differently today if the obligations of paying the minimum payments to which you are so accustomed weren’t around anymore? Would you move to a new city? Take a more enjoyable job? Would you quit the 8-5 grind? Would you start creating again?

Debt sucks.

Debt may be normal in our society today, but I don’t care. I know from personal experience how damaging it is to our creativity. Make the decision today – declare debt to be the enemy of your art.

“How can I possibly live without debt?”

A year and a half ago, my wife and I made the decision to declare debt as the enemy of our art. Since then, we’ve gotten on a budget, told our money where to go, and paid off nearly $30,000 in student loan, consumer, and car debt. We are on a plan to be totally debt free within two more years.

No, we don’t make six figures. No, we don’t live rent-free with relatives. We simply have sacrificed, planned, and made the decision to change. We still have fun, even on a budget; we still eat awesome food every now and then. But we have decided to make our own decisions about what we want to do in life, not let the crushing weight of our debts make those decisions for us. It can be done; we are living proof.

The world needs your creativity. We need your art, your words, your music, your voice. Please don’t let debt stifle it anymore.

P.S.

If you want to know how we have been so successful in throwing off the yoke of debt, please feel free to reach out to me here on my blog or at any of the social media sites listed on the home page. I have a lot of resources I’d love to share with you, as well as some awesome people you should listen to. It would be my pleasure to talk to you.

We are big fans of the Dave Ramsey Baby Steps as a roadmap for getting out of debt and building wealth, as well as his company’s EveryDollar budgeting app for keeping track of your money and telling it where to go.

by Nathan Coumbe

Discovering a new passion!

I always believed that I was creative in only one realm, that realm being music. I have since discovered that I was wrong. Who would have thought that a musician and amateur historian would fall in love with computer programming and web development?

I began working for a very large tech company in 2017 which required learning countless new skills. One of those many skills was learning the basics of computer coding so that I might teach others in a rudimentary fashion. I quickly discovered that I had a knack for solving problems and puzzles with these languages. Not only was I good at it, I was enjoying it! It was the first thing since my days of practicing music for hours on end that caused me to lose track of time while I worked.

After a while, I decided to explore this area further and see what coding could do in the real world. I came across Codecademy.com thanks to my wife, Theresa; she is a brilliant mathematician and wonderful teacher who has had to learn coding for her master’s degree. I worked through the Code Foundations plan, then picked up the Web development plan. The results are below:

My first little webpage! A HUGE thanks to all of the people working at Codecademy.com for their awesome instructional materials, of which this was a part!

There isn’t much to it, I know, but I am thrilled! I haven’t felt this excited in a long time; I built, from scratch, a simple arts & crafts website today! Using nothing but a “spec sheet” given to me by Codecademy.com, which told me what the desired appearance of the page was to be, and one quick Google search for the answer to a question, I went to work. I programmed my own HTML and CSS code into my new text editor from Atom, linked the files together, inserted pictures, and built a simple, attractive little home page within an hour. I never dreamed I would be doing this, and yet here I am. This has been scratching my creative itch like I never thought possible. 

What begins as a collection of symbols, words, and at times what appear to be indecipherable hieroglyphics comes together in a web browser to show the reader the pictures you see above. It is simply miraculous! Creating physical art by hand is not something at which I have ever been skilled, but by using my newfound computer skills, I think I will be making my own type of art.

I am not finished learning; my skills are still in their infancy, and there are coding languages which I have not yet touched. But the fire which I thought only responded to music has again been lit. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have more work to do!