[antifragile 4 🔥 - creativity 🎨] your imagination is bottlenecking your life, creating vs consuming, the value of handwriting, creative hours in the day

#25: a weekly 4-item newsletter created to inspire dads to use the challenges of fatherhood as fuel for building an incredible life & an antifragile mind.

Dec 13, 2024

Welcome to the 25th edition of the antifragile 4 🔥.

It’s a weekly 4-item newsletter created to inspire dads to use the challenges of fatherhood as fuel for building an incredible life & an antifragile mind. Some weeks will have a theme, others will meander. Expect it every Friday.

In today’s edition - we’re talking creativity 🎨. A concept often kicked to the curb as a “waste of time” in adulthood.

Here is this week’s antifragile 4 🔥 - creativity 🎨 edition:

a thread 🧵 on bottlenecking your imagination
an excerpt about creating vs consuming 🎨 from Derek Sivers
an idea ✍️ on the value of handwriting
a quote on the number of creative hours ⏰ in the day

+ AI Image of the Week 🤖

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1.) a thread 🧵 on your imagination bottlenecking your life

This one needs a little context - but it’s profound.

The post below went viral earlier this year. Someone had asked “what hobbies can a 25 year old have other than the gym and drinking?”, to which a woman replied with several gorgeous oil paintings saying “I started painting at 35. I’m 39 now…”.

Aside from unleashing a torrent of “What the f*#$ am I doing with my life if this woman is making beautiful paintings and I’m just looking at Twitter”-type thoughts, it also prompted a profound thread from this user (quoted in full below).

It's pretty crazy the extent to which people's lives are literally bottlenecked by their imagination of what their life can be.
…A lot of people genuinely don't internalize the fact that they could literally start making art at any point in their life, especially right now. Art has taken up the status of the thing that only "talented" people do, and it's something you passively consume, or at best analyze, but never make yourself.
Even within exercising itself for instance, it's crazy how many people just go to the gym because they've never considered looking for other alternatives, which would be way more fun and social. Like team sports, a hiking group, running partners, etc.
And of course this limitation in imagination trickles down into something way bigger than the individual life, it coalesces into the limited collective life we imagine, but even on the micro life it's incredibly noticeable.
People just scroll social media because they don't put the time to think of better ways to spend their time. (and then they complain about how much social media sucks and drains their time).
Inkolore post

Our lives are bottlenecked by our imagination of what they can be.

Assuming we’re not talking about defying the laws of physics or limits of science, there are relatively few things in life you literally can’t do.

From that bucket, lets pluck ones that hurt other people or result in your own immediate demise (i.e. bungee jumping without a bungee). And as parents (I guess) we need to take our kids’ safety into consideration too. So let’s also pluck free solo’ing with our 2-year-old.

But beyond that? You can pretty much do whatever the hell you want to do. It’s our imaginations (and fears) that limit us. Here’s a little graph to visualize:

(As a reminder, this also applies with kids. The calculus is just a little different.)

So to get the juices flowing, here’s a list of things you could do if you wanted:

Record an album
Start a garden
Take a year off work and spend it traveling with your kids
Join a hip-hop dance group
Paint a mural on one of your living room walls
Quit your job
Complete a triathlon
Join CrossFit
Buy exclusively fox-themed furniture for your house
Tell your job you’re quitting unless they let you work from Tuscany
Get a tattoo of Popeye the Sailorman bench pressing the Bitcoin symbol 🤔
Tell your friend you're sorry and it was stupid
Build a sauna from scratch
Give your housecleaner a Christmas bonus big enough to buy a car
Only read spy novels
Only read smutty novels
Only read Russian classics
Decorate your house with naughty Harry Potter fan art 😂

Life is so full of incredible opportunities. And we only have a few short years to play around with them. Where are you letting your imagination limit you?

2.) an excerpt about creating vs consuming 🎨 from Derek Sivers

If you don’t know Derek Sivers, you’re in for a treat. He’s an entrepreneur, musician, and all-around magical individual.

(If you want a deeper dive into his crackling creative energy, listen to this episode)

He wrote an incredible book called Anything You Want, which I strongly recommend. I have yet to read How To Live, but found this excerpt below extremely powerful.

Which would you rather be?
Someone who hasn’t created anything in years because you’re so busy consuming?
Or someone who hasn’t consumed anything in year becuase you’re so busy creating?
Derek Sivers