You Can be Great If You Really Want To

The visual world of infants is a “booming and buzzing confusion”, as 19th century psychologist and philosopher William James said. Indeed, as soon as babies are born, their vision undergoes many rapid developments during the first year. Images that appear gray, hazy, and out of focus in the first few weeks become more defined and and colorful in the next months. When these blurs start to become clearer to the child, that’s when the journey toward creativity and visual development begins.

Vision also plays a vital role in brain growth during the first year. A child’s visual faculties is one of the most important factors in developing his or her creativity. By creativity, it is meant that the infant is able to distinguish and identify what he or she sees and attribute them to particular objects.

To an infant, this is what creativity is about. Ninety percent of information entering the average human brain is visual. Providing the proper visual stimulation, therefore, is vital since healthy vision leads to baby’s future overall mental and physical well-being.

What infants see

Infants may have uncoordrinated eye movement and appear cross-eyed over the first few months. However, they are born with the ability to focus at close range – about 9 to 12 inches, or the distance between a mother’s face and the baby in her arms.

Experts say that babies are able to follow or track an object in the first few weeks. By 6 months of age, the visual and creative system is nearly adult-like in function. As a matter of fact, infants can see about 20/400 after birth, then 20/40 by age one. Focus improves over the first 2 to 3 years, and eventually approaches normal 20/20 vision. But the most dramatic change occurs during the first 8 months.

Newborn babies can distinguish light from dark but cannot see all colors. Distinguishing between colors won’t be fine-tuned until around 3 months. This is why many baby books and infant stimulation toys have distinct black and white patterns. Large black and white patterns present the highest possible contrast (100%) to the eye and, thus, are the most visible and attractive to babies.

High contrast encourages visual and creative development and physical movement like wiggling, kicking, and arm waving. However, recent studies have proven that babies can also distinguish shades of gray. By about 2 months of age, the baby becomes capable of perceiving almost all of the subtle shadings that make our visual world so rich, textured and interesting.

And since there is a part of the human brain that is dedicated solely to facial recognitions, newborns are naturally drawn to human faces. This specific recognition mechanism is one of the first indicators of creativity building in a child. It helps form a bond between the mother and child, particularly during breastfeeding. By 2 months, infants can recognize facial features, such as the eyes and mouth. By 4 to 5 months, they can distinguish their mother’s face from others’.

Creativity begins with visual stimulation. Thus, it is the duty of every caregiver or parent to expose their kids to all sorts of colors and images early on, in order for the child to be equipped with the proper skills once the stage of actual creation comes, which is usually at age 2 to 3 years old. For infants, what creativity is is the acknowledge that a lot of images and colors exist, which is then followed, as he or she grows older, by the improved ability to build.

Quotations are considered one of the most powerful literary creations, because they are able to address certain issues and influence people and ideas with just a few words. These soundbites from famous people, or even the infamous and unfamous, are packed with so much meaning that they have lasted through centuries of scrutiny and criticism.

In fact, it’s difficult to criticize quotations, because their meanings and messages are often so clear and hard-hitting that trying to analyze them and split them into sub-meanings is an exercise in futility.

Below are some of the more popular quotations on creativity. Read on and enjoy.

Duke Ellington: “A problem is a chance for you to do your best.”

Leonardo da Vinci: “Go some distance away because the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony or proportion is rapidly seen.”

Ortega Y Gassett: “The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.”

Albert Einstein: “Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which the problems were created.”

Jonathan Miller: “Since finding out what something is is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors.”

Haridas Chaudhuri: “The greater the emphasis on perfection the further it recedes.”

Kierkegaard Soren: “Backwards understood be only can but, forwards lived be must life.”

Arie de Geus: “The ability to learn faster than the competition is often the only sustainable competitive advantage a company can have.”

Lauren Bacall: “Standing still is the fastest way of moving backwards in a rapidly changing world. Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.”

Charles Darwin: “In the long history of humankind (and animalhood, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

Theodore Levitt: “Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress.”

Alfred North Whitehead: “The ‘silly’ question is the first intimation of some totally new development.”

Albert Einstein: “If at first, the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.”

Michael Porter, Harvard Business School: “Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity.”

Peter F Drucker: “Whenever you see a successful business someone once made a courageous decision.”

Buckminster Fuller: “There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.”

Esa Saarinen: “The opposite of creativity is cynicism.”

Marian Anderson: “As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.”

George Bernard Shaw: “You see things and say ‘Why’. But I dream things that never are and say ‘Why not?’”

Hugh Prather: “Some people will like me and some won’t. So I might as well be myself, and then at leaswt I know that the people who like me, like me.”

J.S. Brown: “Instead of pouring knowledge into people’s heads, we need to help them grind a new set of glasses so that we can see the world in a new way.”

Christopher Logue: “Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to edge. It’s too high! Come to edge! And they came, and he pushed… and they flew.”

Raymond Kurzweil: “Launching a breakthrough idea is like shooting skeet. People need change, so you must aim well ahead of the target to hit it.”

Julius Hare: “Half of the failures in life arise from pulling on one’s horse as it is leaping.”

Albert Szent Gyorgi: “Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”

Walt Disney: “If you can dream it, you can do it.”

Most of the people think that creativity is all about being creative and thinking what is nice and creative, of course. Yes, that is one of the points of creativity but that is not all that you should take notice of. Once you have accomplished being creative, you also have to take care of your creativity.

By taking care of it, it is not cultivation, like bacteria, nor is it caressing until it goes to sleep. You should, at least, be careful of whatever creative ideas you have. You have to be a little discreet at first. For if you do not, then you are risking its safety and it will probably be stolen and claimed by somebody else.

If you are much more of a technological person, with the use of computers and the like, you must, at least, put a password on your computer so that anyone else who tries to pry open you programs to get that very precious information an uninitiated artist would need, will weep in desperation for having not accomplished the theft.

Another risk is the risk of having your creative destroyed. Creativity cannot remain as an idea forever. You have to make tangible your creative idea, therefore, when you do draw you idea, or mold, or compose, or whatever artistic genre your creative idea belongs to, take care of your product. If you have made a drawing, make sure it does not get wet and other kinds of avoiding tactics. If you cannot take care of your own work then you are not cut out to be a creative artist.

Do not risk having your work destroyed just because you were careless or because you forgot about something that you really should not have forgotten.

You should also be aware of what kinds of artwork other artists have produced. You might believe that your work was original and was, indeed, very creative, yet you just do not know it but someone else has done the exact same thing. You really would not want to be branded a copycat. Your originality is probably the best bank artists have, do not lose it or have your reputation as an artist be degraded, for without your good name, no one will admire your works of art, no matter how good they can be.

Another important risk is that, you risk having your work not admired. It is not eventual that just because you like your work and you think it is nice, it means other people who look at it will like it too. That is not the case all the time. Oftentimes, the work you do is loathed by other people because of individual factors. You have their ethnicity, traditions and cultures and genders.

If you made something that was a little insensitive towards a certain tribe, then, of course, your artwork will not desired by those who belong to that certain tribe, or if you made something about rape or moldings of women’s private body parts. It is not all the time that women will immediately understand your purpose or what you meant with your work. You have to be more sensitive because what you think and feel as an artist are not felt and thought by all.