Goals for 2010: Part 7 – Create
This goal can be interpreted in plenty of ways and won’t be easy to quantify. The basic philosophy behind this goal is to take some time each week to create something original. This goal could be satisfied by contributing to an OSS. There may be a few lines of code I contribute that I have created. But I want to find some other ways to expand my horizons and explore my own creativity. One way I have been doing this lately is by writing. I have actually been working on a few science fiction short stories. I don’t plan on becoming a famous author, but I’ve found that I rather enjoy writing and it’s a good way for me to exercise my mind in areas that typically lie dormant when I’m configuring servers, troubleshooting users, or writing some code.
I should mention that in school I’m writing 4-6 original papers per week, so I suppose that would meet the criteria for this goal, but unless I find one of these to be exceptional I would like to keep the creative juices flowing in some other way.
Perhaps the biggest challenge with this goal, and several of the others, is time. With school and work and the family, when will I have time to be creative? I believe my youngest son, Grant, has come up with a solution to this problem. Each week at the local Books-A-Million a large group of kids get together to play Yu-Gi-Oh! and he wants to go there as often as he can. So my current plan is to take my laptop with me to BAM each Saturday afternoon and while he plays, I’ll create. I’ve done this a couple of times so far and it’s worked great. The local BAM does NOT have Wi-Fi available, so there’s no distractions, and the environment seems to be conducive to pumping those creative juices around my grey matter. So we’ll see how this goes the rest of the year. If I come up with something I like well enough, you may find it here at bamed.org.