You are a creative genius.

You might not believe it right now, but if you are even reading these words, you have learned a skill that many people around the world have yet to grasp - and that is the skill of reading.

Through that skill, you are able to educate yourself on a wide variety of topics - and especially if you’re out of college or no longer in high school, you’ll realize something pretty quickly: that you are the one who is stuck trying to figure out what to learn next when you don’t have teachers or bosses or parents or pastors or some other authority figure telling you what you should be learning.

You can handle this in a few ways - and probably the most common way is to avoid self-education altogether. That is, unless you’re just mindlessly “feeding” on the barrage of information that is spewed at you from a wide variety of news “feeds” (see the parallel? What do you feed your brain on?), popular media, or social media and modern celebrity gossip.

There’s another way you can handle this dillemma of self-education, and that is deciding that you want to learn about things that make you come alive and that you really believe in.

Maybe you want to actually figure out how to make a living doing what you love or with your art. If you are going to do any kind of meaningful creative work - whether that is release an album, create your own blog, write your own books, start your own business, or get serious about rebuilding broken relationships in your life - you’re going to have to start limiting your information intake and increase your creative output.

One of the things that is the most mind-blowing to me about the world we live in is how much we are able to do and create with very little overhead cost or “higher education” training.

However, we’re all so easily distracted by all of the zillions of different bits of information that we consume on a daily, hourly, or minute-by-minute basis on social media or in our wide variety of news feeds.

We all can literally have mini production studios in our pockets with all the different apps and things you can use on your smart phones and tablets to create original content like videos, blog posts (that can be repurposed and turned into books), and so much more.

A significant portion of the original content that we create starts out on our mobile devices - and a whole lot of it is stuff that we produce entirely on our phones or tablets.

Think about that for a minute.

Major filmmakers like Martin Scorcese and musicians like Hans Zimmer are using some of the same gear or devices to create their works of art that you most likely have right now.

The question is: What are you DOING with them?

Are you spending all of your time just consuming, consuming, consuming? Swiping, double-tapping, and doing the modern-day version of “channel-flipping” (for those of you who remember that dinosaur called the television)?

Or are you learning how to leverage these miracles of modern technology as creative expressions of who you are and what you’re passionate about?

My biggest encouragement to you going into 2018 and as you pursue your creative career or as you are struggling to figure out how to get the word out about what you do is this: stop scrolling and go make something.

The returns on the investment of your time is well worth it, and very well could be the what launches you into a life that most others only dream about.

Below are a couple of videos - one that hammers home more of the points made above and the other one is a behind the scenes look at how we put all this stuff together.

Let us know if you have any questions or would like some coaching or practical help bringing your creative ideas to life!