Reflection 5: The life, near death, and revival of my buddy Creative.

The sun is shining on the second last day of undergrad. I can taste the victory beer and champagne around the corner. The brief freedom that will come and go as the hustle of real life begins.

Let me begin this post with a tale of epic proportions, a tale of heartbreak, romance, love, hate, and near-death… well I’ll keep the romance out of this one.

I can remember design thinking in preschool. I remember being able to use tools and make furniture, use my imagination to make art. I remember the praise and encouragement I would get from my parents and teachers for being creative. This pattern continued throughout elementary and even into high school but to a lesser extent. I distinctly remember having to make an argument for a creative project I did in my final year of high school. Maybe this is where I threw in the towel.

Regardless, provincial exams came around; everyone studied hard to achieve what our parents told us to. I got into UBC Arts, the first source of Heartbreak, not getting into Sauder. I didn’t really enjoy my classes. I didn’t see how literature would apply to my future as with anthropology. This lack of inspiration for school led me to make the best decision I’ve ever made in my life, QUIT SCHOOL.

I ran my own painting company for the summer. Looking back on this experience, it was definitely a design process to get business and maximize my profits. I look back and realize teaching employees to paint, managing them, and taking the right shortcuts was a design process. However painting made my mind idle, the money was great but I couldn’t take the mind numbing boredom. So I QUIT.

What was next? I didn’t know but Craigslist soon found me an opportunity. I responded to an ad looking for people with experience in team sports and competitive nature. Before I knew it I was doing door-to-door sales. I was designing a consistent approach and modifying it for every door. By the end of this job I knew every breed of dog, all the types of hardwood, and could tell you a lot about any car in the driveway. Customizing every approach in split second gave me a lot of freedom and can definitely be related to the design process. I would have to try a lot before I would succeed. I would have to ask a lot of questions to my leaders and try different approaches with them too. Every morning in the office we would go through a design process with new salespeople, they would ask, try, then do in the field. After a while though I was tired of getting rained on and wanted to move on, so what did I do? I QUIT. But this is where my love of sales and commission-based jobs began and I will never forget it.

The experiences I gained out of school during this year were the most important parts of my education. With the experiences I was now able to join the cattle heard back at the University Factory. Looking back on projects and assignments, it was always thinking what the teacher wanted. The thought of being too creative or thinking too far outside of the box was an outlandish concept for a Sauder student. Why push boundaries when you can mitigate risk and aim for a safer chance at a good mark?

So, like almost every other Sauder student, I fell into the cookie cutter mould. For most of my undergrad I can remember cramming frameworks, terms, and meaningless concepts into my head on order to regurgitate them onto the test paper the next day only to have the concepts leave my head as soon as they came in. I’m great at sticking a lot into short-term memory and reciting it. THANK YOU UNIVERSITY!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is the near-death part of the story, my creativity was being drowned with terms, frameworks, and what teachers wanted, NOT what I wanted.

Something changed in fourth year marketing however. Four out of my six classes were project based. This meant less exams and the ability to work with a balanced group of people towards a common goal. One of these classes happened to be Design Studio. This is where I discovered my creative side, weak, starving, beaten and bloody in a muddy ditch on the right side of my brain. Creative’s voice was hoarse, his tenacity gone, he was ready to give up, lie down in the ditch, and let the left side consume him. I heard him speak around the third class: “Scotttt, I’m still here.”

My obvious response was: “Who the eff are you budday?” I guess he got a bit rattled and stayed silent for a bit longer. But he wasn’t ready to give up yet. The class that I can really remember ‘Creative’ grabbing my brain cells by the reigns and harnessing them on a glorious chariot of fire throughout my brain was when we got to design the open house, from start to finish, through every design step. Creative was back and vibing with Lucy in the sky of diamonds.

Now that the right side of my brain is somewhat revived I’ve starting thinking about problems and concepts more holistically. I’m asking why instead of just choosing to memorize and regurgitate. Sauder killed my creativity but this course started to bring it back. Now that I will be starting my future in a sales based job, I hope that the creative design techniques I’ve learned in this class will help me in the future.