Ever since I was in the 6th grade I’ve wanted to be creative. At that time, what it meant to be creative for me was to draw or be an artist. So when I got into the 7th grade, I decided to join Beginning Art as a class. After day one, I dropped the class because I thought I would not be able to do the things the teacher asked us to do and I thought it was too hard. I couldn’t imagine I was capable of drawing. Little did I know, that was how I was living life. I am clear now that in order for me to understand something or process something, I have to see it. It needs to be visually processed in my head for me to believe it – to believe that it’s possible.
From that point on, anything to do with drawing, I avoided for the most part. There were moments when I really devoted myself to drawing and in those moments I came up with some of the finest drawings I had ever done. Those drawings heavily incorporated glitter and color. Crafts (like drawings using glitter and color, more tactile works) – I could definitely do easily, because that work is all processing something in front of you; hands on, touchy, actual stuff. I embraced my craftsmanship. I even thought of multiple ways to create items, alter them and mass produced them. Yet, that did not wholly satisfy my creativity. From a very young age, I felt creativity was only understood to be expressed within a very small box. Furthermore, I felt that only a short list of creative endeavors could be interpreted as being creative. I never saw myself inside the box of creativity. So what did I do? I expanded the definition of the box.
In college I took a photography class, where I shot 35mm black and white film and processed it. I loved it! My friends even said that I spent so much time in the dark room I was going to go crazy. It never occurred to me like that. Playing with the development, my film, making things look the way I wanted them to, manipulation… it was all fun for me. It was a self expression I could share with people but that creative pursuit ended when I graduated college because I had didn’t have a dark room.
In my “real world”, the search for my creativity was never ending - until now. Recently I’ve been able to grow the box to incorporate what I want in it, to define creativity by my own definition. The thing that’s changed is not what I say creativity is, it’s the context that I have around creativity. My context about creativity exists in the realm of real estate. Oddly enough, I’m blown away by the creativity of other people in this area and that makes me excited about creativity and real estate too.
For example, most people know that to buy a house, one saves up for a down payment, picks the house and gets a loan. That’s what we know because we talk to people who buy houses, or real estate professionals that help us buy homes. We were taught in school about the real estate world to a limited degree. However, there are other options in buying real estate that maybe aren’t covered under the conventional wisdom. One can acquire a property through multiple means, from county auctions through trustee sales – and often at discounted rates. The bottom line is we have options in real estate and life and we sometimes don’t know that we have options. It is part of the creative process to make those options a reality that is one of the main things that makes the real estate industry fun and fulfills my desire to be creative.
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