How To Prevent School From Destroying Your Creativity
All you need is 5 minutes a day. If you can find a way to write for just 5 minutes every single day, you’ll begin forming a bubble of thought.
What school does to crush a persons creativity is called, “flooding.”
Flooding is a situation where an organization hits a person with so much information, that the brain has no hope of processing it all. Then to further increase the pressure, they use the grading system to enforce the submersion of a persons self-esteem.
Through this dynamic of flooding and grading, the individuals sense of self eventually begins to disintegrate. Until they are molded into a product ready for consumption. For what other reason would a person need to endure the hell of taking 8 classes in high school, or 4-5 in college?
The reason writing for at least 5 minutes a day is so effective, is because you’re outside the education system for a short period of time. It’s important, however, to write what you want to write. Personally, I’d start with journaling. This is mostly because you’ll begin to see how you think about things. You’ll start to gain an understanding of how your thoughts move, and the gaps between them. Eventually, if you keep up this practice, you’ll start asking questions. This period of asking questions is very important, because it means your curiosity is starting to flourish.
The more questions a person asks, the stronger their mental tensile strength will become. And over time, they’ll begin to grow a rich inner life.
A rich inner life is important because in large part, it’s responsible for the development of intellectual self-esteem. This type of esteem doesn’t derive from arbitrary metrics enforced by parental figures, social structures, or institutional bodies.
It’s built out from the inside, and reinforced by a persons internally recognized accomplishments. During this phase, however, it’s important to keep these activities to one’s self.
Why?
It’s because people like to give opinions, and more often than not. They’ll probably be negative. They may not do this out of spite or ill will, however, their words can be inadvertently detrimental to your progress.
Why?
Because the mind is amendable to suggestion. Meaning that if it hasn’t built any resistance to counter arguments such as, “you can’t do that,” or “well he went to Harvard, your just a kid,” your mind will begin to shutdown from the devils wedge of doubt.
Even to this day, I practice the art of not informing people of what books I’m working on. Because even after having written 30 books, people still want to throw in their 2 cents of doubt every once in a while.
Long story short, you must build out a bunker within your spirit. For five minutes everyday, practice writing what you want to write. A short story, a poem… a tiny journal entry. Anything is better than nothing, and eventually that nothing will grow into something if you keep at it.
Hello! We’re D.J. Hoskins
We are Davena and Jason Hoskins, co-authors of 30+ books and siblings who write under the pseudonym D.J. Hoskins. Three years apart and in our twenties, we have been fascinated by stories from a young age. Davena is a student attending Princeton University, and Jason attends Georgetown University.
