Habits of Mind: Creativity and Persistence

(Also I am Italian and I find these recent Italian memes to be wicked funny so I included a few)

I have to say, my attempt at playing Minecraft is almost laughable. I recently started making my villain sanctuary and it is a lot harder than I had originally imagined. For starters, I had to fly around for nearly 20 min looking for snow, with no success. After that you found a seed that put me in a snowy world, which fixed that problem, so then I set to building my villain sanctuary. I tried to build down from the top of the mountain and just kept digging but didn’t really make a cave so gave up there. I moved to the side of the mountain made a little cave that I was damn proud of, then all of a sudden it’s night time. I can’t see anything in my little cave so I throw some torches up there. I walk away, come back, and all my snow is melted! Like what kind of sick joke was that? I am not gonna lie that was a hard blow. The solution to the melting snow was not all that hard, I was just genuinely upset that snow could melt. In theory, it makes sense but who in their right mind was like “oh I have a great idea! Let’s make every source of light in Minecraft melt snow! That’ll be funny to watch!” It is quite frankly just mean and not at all what I signed up for.

Okay, now that I got that off my chest I feel a lot better.

I have to say all this Minecraft stuff is really testing my creativity. I think I am a creative person naturally, but it comes in weird bursts of creativity. I can’t just have an assignment and then all of a sudden have a million great ideas right then and there. It’s more of some assignments spark really good ideas, and other leave me lost and wandering around (kind of like me flying looking for snow in Minecraft). I used to teach dance in high school and I had the same issue with making up dances. Occasionally a song would speak to me and I’d be like damn so many ideas are flowing this is great, and a dance is done in like two hours. Other times I’ll be super into a song get half way, then complete road block. Most often I would just be completely uninspired and have a road block set up no matter what I did to change it. This is gonna sound very granola but I think my issue is that I don’t get out and do things enough. My friend Hannah is an amazing painter and shes always going hiking, and road tripping to different national parks. I think that really helps her be creative. I try to go hiking but it’s really hard to find time during the weekends when I am behind on work. In the future I want to work on that.

This week I also worked on my persistence. I could’ve just given up and walked away at the first sign of snow melting, but I didn’t. I kept trying to rebuild snow where it had melted. Granted that wasn’t the best strategy to fix the problem, but I gave it my all. I really hope my villain sanctuary and raid 7 build can turn out kind of alright because that would definitely make me feel accomplished. If they don’t turn out good, I hope they at least turn out laughably loud and we can all have a good laugh about it by the end of the semester. I know what you’re thinking: I set my goals too high. But hey, if you can’t be great you may as well be terrible right?