Brad Salomons

Tag: purpose

  • genuine

    genuine

    The temptation felt by the potential of a blank page as I sit down to type these words each time I post is sometimes bigger than I can explain.

    We all want to be more than we are, don’t we?

    I see this blank page in front of me and I yearn to manifest some sort of great and compelling wisdom through my fingers, into the keyboard and out into the universe. I want to inform. I want to entertain. I want to make people think and wonder and philosophize.

    There are a handful of great communicators out there doing just that. Men and women who each day sit down at a blank page and turn their thoughts into a missive on life or business or success or coping with failing at any or all of those things.

    I read some of those words.

    They do genuinely inspire me.

    And here I sit, yearning to have even a fraction of the impact.

    Yet, their secret to success probably has little to do with the effort they make, and likely almost entirely to do with the truth of their situation: when they sit down at that canvas to write or paint or shape bits into meaning, they have something that is unique and genuinely worth communicating.

  • hammer meet nail

    Creativity is sometimes, to borrow a turn of phrase, a hammer looking for a nail.

    Inside every creative soul there can be this latent urge to make something, anything, and despite the tools sitting on shelves or the technology idling on the desk, all of it patiently waiting for inspiration to strike, the creative hammer can sometimes be lacking a nail to strike.

    Motivation without a project to constuct.

    That’s not to say there isn’t always something worth pounding away at, a loose fence board or a wobbly bench that needs a few good thwacks, but constucting something brand new, whole cloth, fresh and crisp and exciting—therein life can sometimes leave the creative soul wanting for such inspiration.

    Thus leaves the poor sap with a perfectly good hammer in his hand to walk from place to place, examining every nook and cranny of his own backyard for a bit of mending to be done or maintenance upon which to direct his energy. He may even fall into the trap of picking through a pile of scrap wood and with a bag of nails in hand feel as though there is something worth constructing from the leftover bits of other projects.

    And sure, interesting artifacts may tumble out of such efforts. It is more soothing for the creative soul, however, to have a blueprint, even if it exists only in his mind, with a fresh purpose and a meaningful objective, to build something out of purposely acquired supply and to create with intent.