Maintaining Creativity

This post is about maintaining creativity and passion in work and life. I feel as driven today as I did when I started working in the I.T. industry and I attribute this to the other interests and pastimes I have. This article is about how I ended up working in the I.T. industry and what, I think, has kept me excited and driven. I suspect this story is not unfamiliar to many people in the industry (maybe not breaking an arm as a starting point though!). I have certainly come across and worked beside others who have similar stories.

I have been passionate about computing for 40 years now. It started when I was 14 (back in 1981) when I broke my arm after falling of a bike I had built. I always liked building things and had been earning pocket money buying old bikes and rebuilding and restoring them before selling them again. 

Faced with a month or two of not being able to build, fix and ride my bikes, I took it as an opportunity to invest in the new ZX81 created by Clive Sinclair. This was to be a turning point for me and the start of a life long passion for computing. I still enjoyed building things and didn't stop repairing and selling bikes. I would then move on to building cars, an in particular, Triumphs. The last car I build was a Triumph MkII GT6 which all seemed to fit perfectly into with my passion for computing. The common thread was the creativity required to solve problems and plan a execute a solution. 

Another of my passions is painting, which may not seem to be a perfect fit for someone so passionate about computing on the surface. It was in my second year of working as a programmer that I started attending a life drawing class in the evening. One of the exercises the teacher suggested was to limit each drawing to only a few minutes after taking time to carefully observe the subject. The purpose of this was to focus on the big picture and the overall feel and composition, rather than the detail. It was amazing how this transformed my drawing and in turn my thinking! It was like my brain had been re-wired over night and my programming would never be the same again. 

I had always thought of programming as an art, but now I was also looking at each problem in a different light. I would take time to properly observe and study the problem in order to see the big picture. This would come into practice again later in life when I started an Organic almond farm based on Permaculture principles with my brother. 

I should mention at this point that I am colour blind and find it difficult to differentiate between Reds, Greens and Blues. I make this point because it also partly directed my career but it also allowed me to express my creativity with colours. When painting I mix colours according to what I see and also, to a degree, with what I understand to be true. I know the science behind colour mixing so when mixing paint for trees or grass I will mix from the yellow and blue paint tubes to produce greens, but once my palette gets a little more busy,  things get a little more interesting :-). I have had a number of comments from teachers and other people about my "creative" use of colours in my paintings. It seems my pictures work on a tone level and my colour choices add something different to an otherwise simple scene.

Colour blindness affected my career also, as I could not enter the field of electronics due to the need to see colours on things such as resistors. This kept me withing the software side of computing until very recently. Through my interest in restoring what are now called vintage computers such as the ZX81, Acorn BBC Micro etc. I found out that technology has now provided tools which negate the need to see colour. I can now buy a cheap multi-function tester which will tell me exactly what value a resistor is (I mention it in this article about building a Jupiter Ace clone). I am still very much an amateur when it comes to electronics but I am finding it fascinating and love learning about the hardware side of computing. 

An example of how different skills and experiences can compliment one another is the Almond farm I started in 2000 with my brother. I was working full time in the I.T. industry and my brother was also working full time but we wanted to make a lifestyle change and bought a farm about two hours drive from where we stayed in Cape Town. The farm was previously used for sheep and was very degraded through years of neglect. The soil appeared dead with no visible life.  We would only be able to farm at weekends so we had to plan around this. The ideal solution for us would involve permaculture principles as this meant we would not be using intensive farming methods and automation of the irrigation system as we would not be there during the week. 

The farm was a great example of how different skills overlapped and compliment each other. The experience I gained while building my car on a friends farm in the 80's definitely helped on a purely practical level. My computing experience was very useful when it came to the design and programming of the irrigation system. I also began to see so many opportunities for  computing applications withing the field of agriculture. Unfortunately in the early 2000's, IOT devices where not common place and technology to monitor the environment was still very expensive. If I still had the farm today, it would have been an excellent place to test and develop IOT applications. 

Below are a few images of the irrigation system and newly planed trees which I built (including the building which was made from straw bales)

The farm also inspired me to do some painting as you can see below. I must stress here that I am an amateur painter so don't expect a Monet or Turner. :-)  

   The point I am trying to make here is that creativity comes from experiencing and observing life and you never know how that will feed back into your career and life. I love learning and like to challenge myself even if it takes me out of my comfort zone as the rewards are always better than if I played it safe and stayed withing my comfort zone. 

I must also mention one more activity which my partner, Adele, introduced me to. Adele loves dancing and persuaded me to come along to salsa lessons. Dancing was not something I was ever comfortable with and I was also not very musical so it was not easy to get the timing right with Latin music. I should mention here that I was born in Scotland and the only dancing we learned at school was Scottish Cèilidh dancing which didn't really require much understanding of music or timing. :-) I have now been attending salsa events and the occasional class for a number of years now and can actually dance in time now (most of the time :-) ). This experience places me in a very different environment and in turn I get the opportunity to experience a very different aspect of life. 

It is, as a result of these different experiences, that I think I have maintained my passion for learning and my career in I.T. I believe that creativity and the ability to think in different ways to solve problems requires putting yourself into situations where you are outside your comfort zone and taking opportunities to learn from new experiences. I feel as motivated today and passionate about my career in computing as I did when I was 14. One difference though is that I have so many more ideas and projects than I did then and never enough time to do everything. I don't see this as a problem though. It's just more things to look forward to. :-) This brings me to retirement. I often hear people talk about what they will do when they retire, which for me has never been an something I need to think about as I don't see myself ever retiring. I love my work as it's not only a way of earning a living, but also my passion.