It's Time to Take Your Creativity Seriously
The path to becoming an Apex Imaginator
Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears,
and never regrets.
Leonardo da Vinci
Taking your creative spark seriously does not mean criticizing yourself endlessly or avoiding smiling publicly. It does mean deciding to value what you have to offer the world.
If you don’t take your creative genius seriously, who will?
Apex Imaginators.
In an article published in 2022, author Hilary G. Escajeda from the University of Mississippi School of Law introduces the stunning concept of “apex imaginators.”
Apex imaginators have invested in their creativity so fiercely that they soar to unimaginable heights. You can be one of them.
Using Leonardo da Vinci as a model, Escaheda defines apex imaginators as people who possess the following characteristics:
Curiosity: A drive to explore and learn
Cognitive range: The ability to apply knowledge across different domains.
Creativity: The capacity to generate novel and valuable ideas
Emotional intelligence: Understanding and managing emotions effectively
Entrepreneurial mindset: Business acumen and strategic risk-taking
An apex predator is not worried about being defeated because it has no equal in the wilderness. Nor do these predators worry about failing - they draw upon inner strength and thousands of hours of experience on the battlefield of survival to walk through life confidently.
Likewise, apex imaginators have no equal in the world. They are unique and have invested thousands of hours in their craft.
The skills listed above are not easily duplicated by artificial intelligence, making them uniquely valuable in the marketplace. The first step in acquiring and developing them is believing that you can.
And then comes the work. A mountain of work.
You need a plan.
The plan is straightforward to understand but much more challenging to implement. This plan has been used hundreds of thousands of times. It has three parts.
Part One: The Thought
Allow the thought of “my creativity is of enormous value” to seep into your soul. Believing your voice is worth listening to is the first step toward becoming an apex imaginator.
In the parlance of psychology, this belief is called self-efficacy.
Follow your bliss, and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.
Joseph Campbell
Part Two: Act.
Do one thing that will send the message to your brain that you are serious about your creative life. You need to provide ironclad, irrefutable evidence to yourself that you are making things happen.
Procrastination and self-doubt can destroy this effort. If you wait until you “feel like it” to get going, you will wait forever. None of us enjoys the hard work of making meaningful things happen in our lives.
The mantra for this step is: Mood follows action.
If you need a dose of discipline and courage to get through this step, read Viola Davis’s memoir, Finding Me, for inspiration. She went through sheer hell to give wings to her dreams.
In psychology, the courage to take action is called agency. Viola Davis had boatloads of it.
Part Three: Engage in a community of like-minded people.
Naysayers and critics throw buckets of water on the flames of desire. Teammates throw gasoline.
Surrounding yourself with people actively pursuing precisely what you are pursuing has the same effect as going to a spin class. What?
If your goal was to become the best physical version of yourself, I would advise you not to go it alone. By being among other fitness enthusiasts, you will likely experience the benefit of having them motivate you to keep going when you feel like quitting. It’s also a great way to make friends.
Teammates are also good at spotting when we’re slacking off or talking BS. A community can hold us accountable to our dreams.
Join a community of creators - preferably face-to-face. Perhaps you gather at a local coffee shop, in a library, or at someone’s home. If there isn’t a community, then start one.
I recently moved to Colorado and signed up with the Nextdoor app to meet people interested in creating drone landscape videos. Within hours, I received several responses.
Remember, mountaineers seldom climb alone, and neither should you.
Curiosity and the Apex Imaginator
One of my strongest traits is my curiosity. It has allowed me to confront failure with the response, “I wonder what went wrong and how I might do things differently?”
Curiosity is a habit that can be carefully cultivated. Read film producer Brian Glazer’s book, A Curious Mind, to learn how scheduling recurring conversations with interesting people can enrich your life and inspire you to keep working toward becoming an apex imaginator.
Ideas are the rocket fuel that propels creativity. Collect as many as you can.
The Perpetual Motion Effect
By following the plan: Thoughts, Action, Community, you will begin to witness yourself making incremental progress—real progress. Your inner thoughts will evolve, and you will see yourself undergo a gradual metamorphosis.
There’s credible science from cognitive psychology to support this claim.
As long as you commit to the plan, it will be self-sustaining. With each passing day, not only will it sustain itself, it will grow more powerful. It will produce the ultimate perpetual motion machine.
You are an apex imaginator waiting to happen: It’s time to move.
If you don’t take your creativity seriously, ask yourself one private and essential question.
“Am I telling myself the truth?”
We human beings are experts at self-deception.
It is far easier and less painful to say, “I really don’t care,” than it is to say, “I care, but I am afraid to see myself stumble, fall, and fail.”
Are you telling yourself the truth?
Get moving - the world needs you. I need you. But more importantly, you need you.