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A creative hobby can help improve your personal growth program May 10, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.
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For anyone who is putting a lot of effort into their personal development program, the process can involve a lot of work, and take on the feeling of a job or chore; all of which can have a depleting effect on our physical, emotional, and mental energy reserves.

One way to help overcome this and keep our energy reserves in balance is to add a creative hobby component to our self-improvement routines.

A creative hobby could involve many forms; arts and crafts, such as painting or drawing; making pottery; or learning a musical instrument; creative writing; studying and doing woodworking.

If you Google “creative hobbies” you will find hundreds of suggestions that you might want to investigate.

If you find a find a hobby that you really enjoy it can help put your mind and emotions into a different zone or plane…one where you are so absorbed that you forget for a while the problems and challenges that each of face every day.

Hobbies have a physical and emotional restorative power, and that attribute can inject more energy into our self-actualization work.

The key: Don’t turn your creative outlet into just another “I have to do this” routine; don’t make it a work project.

PS: There’s an interesting article on the mental and emotional restorative value of hobbies, and in particular the dangers of turning a hobby into yet another productivity-oriented chore, in the New York Times:

— Dennis Mellersh

Personal growth: Eric Hoffer on the essentials of creativity September 22, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Development and Creativity, The Creative Process.
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Eric Hoffer writes that “…tinkering and playing, and the fascination with the nonessential were a chief source of the inventiveness which enabled man to prevail over better-equipped and more purposeful animals.”

He describes earliest “man” as “the only lighthearted being in a deadly serious universe,” a universe whose other living creatures were driven by a “grim purposefulness.”

Hoffer takes this further in his frequent assertion that the essential driver of human creativity is playfulness rather than high purpose.

“It is a juvenile notion that a society needs a lofty purpose and a shining vision to achieve much…one must be ignorant of the creative process to look for a close correspondence between motive and achievement in the world of thought and imagination,” he states.

If Hoffer is right, it makes one wonder then, if being overly serious and having excessively lofty goals in our artistic/creative efforts could actually be hampering our inventiveness, originality, and overall creativity.

Note: Quotations are from Hoffer’s book, Reflections on the Human Condition

– Dennis Mellersh