Creative Exercise #4: Make Mistakes

I just saw a youtube video with Sir Ken Robinson speaking about how our current education system (NCLB, anyone?) tends to kill creativity (just ask any parent or teacher). Not to get on that soap box, but he says that kids will take a chance - they're not afraid of being wrong, and if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. He quotes Picasso as saying, "All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up." Robinson asserts that we don't grow into creativity - we grow out of it. It's a long video, but interesting, and I think worth watching.

So here's our assignment: make mistakes. What?!? All you perfectionists out there are freaking out right now. Really. Make a mistake, or show a mistake that you've made that you love. Maybe you messed up a recipe and it's now your family's favorite. Or you painted your bathroom wall a wrong color and now you want to paint your whole house that color. Because let's not get any further in our creative exercises without feeling that we're allowed to make mistakes.

Here's mine...This was taken at a friend's wedding years ago, just for fun (I wasn't the real photographer). It's wrong - I mean, it is BLURRY! Not just a little blurry, but seriously blurry! But in all these years, I've never been able to delete it. I love it - it's one of my favorites. Crazy, huh? Now, I'm not saying I'm going to make all my photos blurry, but just because a photo isn't technically perfect, does that mean we can't love it?