What is the SIZE of fight in you?

Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind on this common belief : creativity is something you are born with and others can only envy.

Wrong. Creativity is a skill that everyone can learn.

People understand that to become skilled at tennis or skiing you have to put in hours of practice. The same is true of creativity.


Often, ideas arrive in a flash of illumination, but they need to be refined, analysed and improved exhaustively. Struggle is to be expected and honored. 

To achieve anything worthwhile takes persistence. The creative are persistent.

Ray Bradbury set himself the task of writing one short story every week. Ten years and 520 short stories later, he wrote one strong enough to publish.

Martha Graham (May 11, 1894 – April 1, 1991) was an American modern dancer and choreographer whose influence on dance has been compared with the influence of Picasso on modern visual arts, the influence of Stravinsky on music, and the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright on architecture.

She was the first dancer to perform at the White House, and receive the highest civilian award of the US: the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her style, the Graham technique, fundamentally reshaped American dance and is still taught worldwide.

This is what she wrote in 1953 titled "An Athlete of God", here is an extract:

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God.

Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
I think the reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living. Many times I hear the phrase "the dance of life." It is close to me for a very simple and understandable reason. The instrument through which the dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived: the human body. It is the instrument by which all the primaries of experience are made manifest. It holds in its memory all matters of life and death and love.

Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration; there are daily small deaths. Then I need all the comfort that practice has stored in my memory and a tenacity of faith. But it must be the kind of faith that Abraham had, wherein he "staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief."

..... And there is grace. I mean the grace resulting from faith: faith in life, in love, in people and in the act of dancing. All this is necessary to any performance in life which is magnetic, powerful, rich in meaning.


.....We have all walked the high wire of circumstance at times. We recognize the gravity pull of the earth as he does. The smile is there because he is practicing living at that instant of danger. He does not choose to fall.

To be creative you have to relentlessly develop and improve yourself and your ideas.

As Mark Twain commented: "It's not the size of the dog in the fight - it's the SIZE OF THE FIGHT IN THE DOG."