I’ve spent years googling everything. Everything. It became prolific when I moved out of home, interstate, with nobody to help me. I called up my mum, I asked my friends, and I asked google. I googled how to boil an egg once. Now I’ve become self reliant on asking for help. I wasted so many nights last year by googling for hours on end, I’d google “How to be happy”, “How to know if you’re in love”, “100 things to do before you die”.
Similarly, this asking for help seeps into my work life too, I ask for help before I’ve attempted anything myself. I rely on others to assist me. For a long time, I thought that not being embarrassed for asking for help was a strength of mine. It landed me a permanent role. Sure, the ability to ask for help is powerful, and the downfall of many successful people who have failed to ask for help when they sincerely need it. I don’t sincerely need help most of the time, I ask anyway.
Deep down, I feel like a fraud. I feel unintelligent, fake, dull and unimaginative. How could I solve a maths problem when I’m not smart enough to? My 15 year old students are wrong about maths, it is very creative. In the same way baking a cake is, you could fuss about for hours, playing around with flavours, colours, exotic ingredients, or you could just follow a recipe. We teach maths by giving a recipe. You still get stuck? Ask for help. Ask for help. Ask for help. Ask for help. Asking for help instead of mucking around, getting creative, having fun, is lost.
I don’t create anymore. I ask for help, I take on the advice of total strangers by reading blog posts, I youtube, google and read self help books. I follow recipes. It’s almost an addiction, an addiction to knowing by absorption. I don’t go out there and find out for myself what creates a happy life, no I google it. I read posts about it. I don’t cultivate it for myself. In the age of technology and access to information overload, it is only too easy to become a sponge. There is a problem with living the life as a sponge, you’re not creating anything for yourself, just mopping up everybody else’s creations.
I feel a change coming on, a quest, if you will. I’m going to be creative and make the life I want, instead of daydreaming about the life that I want. I am going to be creative. I will let inspiration take me away and see what comes up. Yes, asking for help is imperative when you’re stuck, but I will give it a red hot go myself before I ask for help. I will make sure I am actually stuck.
Asking for help, relying on others, taking advice on board without thinking, these things all destroy creativity. Your problems are uniquely yours, if your solution is to turn to somebody else then you’ve just given away your gift of solving a problem. That’s not creative. That’s being a sponge.
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