EXCERPT FROM IGNITE YOUR IDEAS: CREATIVITY FOR KIDS (pp. 95-98)
If you want to be the best version of yourself, don’t settle for being less, doing less, or learning less. It will compromise your intelligence, wellness, and creativity, and impede your productivity.
The Importance of Effort
There are many reasons why effort matters, only one of which is that it will boost your creativity. After you read through the point below, consider chatting about them with your parents to see if they agree, and how they might be able to assist you. You might even want to get creative and debate these ideas, going back and forth over them. (Heads up, it will involve critical and divergent thinking, and it’ll require effort—but that’s okay!)
- Effort helps desires come true. What you aspire toward is not always attainable, depending on the size of your aspirations, how reachable they might be, and what supports you have in place. For example, If you’d like to learn to play piano, you’ll need a keyboard and some instruction. If you enjoy painting, you’ll require art materials. Those are basic practicalities. They’re not hugely demanding. Ultimately though, hopes and dreams are intensified by effort as well as practicalities. Aspirations are great starting points, but if you want to turn possibilities into accomplishments it will require preparation, self-discipline, and hard work. Be “proactical”—that’s my personally invented descriptor for being proactive and practical. Do you have a favorite author, dancer, role model…? Explore how they proactically strove to succeed.
Effort affects every aspect of life including your schooling, what happens at home, your thoughts, your feelings, your extracurricular activities, and your community involvement.
There are lots of opportunities to nurture effort. Look for people who can encourage you.
Author’s Note:
Here are 6 additional key points that I discuss in Ignite Your Ideas: Creativity for Kids. Each of these points has a bearing on creative expression, and on outlook, behavior, and outcomes, too. Find out more about these impactful factors in Chapter 7:
- Effort is a learning curve.
- Effort leads to greater confidence.
- Effort furthers greater creative and intellectual development.
- Effort leads to collaboration with others.
- Effort increases engagement and independence.
- Effort boosts brainpower (neural plasticity and the brain’s developmental pathways).
The best way you can learn about the value of effort is by engaging in your own fulfillment.
