Tag / creativity

by Nathan Coumbe

Start something.

A number of weeks ago, my wife and I went out to play some pick-up soccer with folks in our community; it didn’t quite go as planned. After a flurry of text messages, it turned out that a flat soccer ball and someone’s annoying brother had wrecked our hopes of playing soccer that evening (yes, there is more than one obvious solution to this problem, but that’s not the point of this story).

We refused to let those issues stop us, and we had an idea (and luckily, a frisbee). We decided to teach the folks who were originally going to play soccer with us how to play Ultimate Frisbee. One hot, sweaty, muddy, grass-covered hour later, our group collapsed on the ground, exhausted and exhilarated. Not only did they all have a blast, they all wanted to know when the next game was happening. Since then, we’ve been playing 2-3 times a week, we have created a subscription calendar that anyone can get to see when the next game is, and our interest and attendance in the group has been steadily growing.

So why I am telling you this story? It’s really quite simple:

Start something.

Do something. Write something. Play something. Call someone and see if they are interested. Send them a text message. Put up a flyer.

Start something.

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

– Walt Disney

We all have ideas that could start something – it may not be a new career or financially lucrative, but it could start a community league, or a charity, or a movement (and it could also be a new career AND financially lucrative).

Just so you know – it might not work.

WHO CARES?

If you never try to do it, then it definitely won’t work.

Do you play guitar? See if you can go teach someone else the basics. Do you draw or paint or sculpt? See if there is someone you know that might want to try a new hobby. Are you an awesome chess player? Find a friend that always wanted to learn or start a group that meets each week to play a tournament.

Start something. It might not work; it might be a bad idea. Do it anyway. And then do it again tomorrow. It might not work.

But what if it does?

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

Replace One Word and Solve a Problem

I have been working on my self-talk a lot recently, and a technique that I have found that really helps me get out of my own way is swapping out the word “but” for the word “and”. This idea came to me after reading a short, but very impactful, blog post by Scott Miller of FranklinCovey entitled “I Can’t Do That”.

How is “but” sabotaging us?

To illustrate the point of how this process can work, let me give you an example with which I am currently wrestling. I studied classical and jazz percussion in college, something that I absolutely loved and found great fulfillment in pursuing. Then I made some stupid decisions and am now currently without a drum set or anything other than a snare drum and some sticks. I would love to start another side hustle using my musical skills and abilities, but I have talked my way out of it many times without even trying. My normal thinking would be “I would love to start a business using my musical skills to teach and play the drums, BUT I don’t have an instrument other than a snare drum.” Well, there you have it – nothing can be done now. I’m stuck. There is no possible way for me to do anything with the skills or resources at my disposal.

Perhaps you already see how this works, but I will walk through it all the same. If I just change the word “but” to the word “and”, something magical happens. “I would love to start a business using my musical skills to teach and play the drums, AND I don’t have an instrument.” Now it is just a problem to solve rather than a brick wall preventing me from making any progress. I could easily follow it up with “so…[insert solution to problem]”, and I have just gotten out of my own way and on the path to a side-hustle. (As an aside, I am positioning myself as an expert snare drummer with a focus on musicality and technique that can be applied to the drum set as well as other percussion instruments.)

Implementation

There are plenty of others ways you can implement this:

  • I want to lose weight, but I don’t have much time.
  • I want to start my own business, but I don’t have any startup capital.
  • I want to get a job in web development, but I don’t know about JavaScript.

You know the drill now – we use “and” now.

  • I want to lose wait, AND I don’t have much time, so I should find a physical activity that I enjoy that doesn’t take up much of my time.
  • I want to start my own business, AND I don’t have any startup capital, so I should find a business idea that costs little or nothing to start making a profit.
  • I want to get a job in web development, AND I don’t know about JavaScript, so I should sign up for an online course or read a book about the subject.

What about you?

Are there things you want to do, AND the word “but” is getting in your way? See what I did there? It’s now just a problem for you to solve! The next time you start talking yourself out of doing something, try this little technique and see if you come up with a possible solution to your problem. You’d be surprised how easy it is.

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!