Make Peace With The Struggle
This post comes from my favorite education innovator, Kwaku Aning. Kwaku is a d.school Fellow, the Director of San Diego Jewish Academy’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Thinking, and the co-host of the Radio Zamunda podcast. He is a prolific innovator, and you can connect with him here.
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I have reached an interesting place in life. Through a lot of luck, hard work, and synchronicity I have found a profession that requires me to chase down ideas. A large part of my job involves nurturing my creativity. As someone who loves to learn, experiment, and ideate this is perfect for me. Through this job I have also realized that I am constantly wrestling with the same challenge:
Do I go deeper on a specific topic and learn more or do I learn something entirely new?
Essentially depth versus breadth.
It feels like there is one part of me that is a proud generalist! Someone who knows just enough about a range of things that they can make interesting connections that aren’t immediately obvious. This skillset is fundamental to the work that brings me joy and purpose.
There is another part of me that is an aspiring “expert.” Someone who has become synonymous with a topic and become the person that everyone wants to collaborate with. This skillset feels fundamental to doing my job well (I’m an Innovation Director at a PreK-12 private school).
One of my favorite parts of my job is working with a teacher and helping them to create an amazing learning experience for students. Every time I repeat a project with a teacher, we do it better. We innovate new ways to do things within the project and we provide a deeper experience for the students. I love being able to develop an idea and see it blossom in that way! All of the knowledge and creative confidence that I gain from the experience is the result of going deeper into the project.
The counterpoint to this perspective is that the connections that I help teachers make is based upon my ability to be a generalist and make connections between their content areas and societal trends in tech, innovation, and the world at large. Empowering students and educators by connecting them to “real world” concepts is an amazing feeling!
Currently I’m at peace with this struggle because I realized two things:
The first is that by nature, creativity will never work in a box of or pattern. My desire to silo my creative process is counterintuitive to being creative. As a result I have learned that I need to accept the tension between learning deeper or exploring new topics.
The second realization is that I feel the tension is a flywheel for my creativity. The push and pull between wanting depth of knowledge or defining an unknown and making a new connection helps to create a balanced approach to the development of my creativity.
This is my creative struggle.