All skateboarding is putting ideas into action.
– Marc Johnson
If you want to be successful in life, you need to be creative. That’s not an overstatement. This doesn’t mean you have to be the next Rembrandt or Steve Jobs or even Banksy. It just means you need to be able to discover connections, and solutions to problems that you face. It is a major part of who you are as a person and helps foster resilience, joy, and opportunities in work and life.
In children, creativity provides a boost in their education and often leads to a better future in relation to jobs and relationships. It is stimulated through independent thinking and pattern learning. it can also be developed through storytelling, drawing, and drama.
For adults, creativity helps relieve stress and anxiety, lessen shame, anger, and depression when faced with trying situations, and allows for an honest expression of one’s feelings. Practicing creative endeavors over a period of time has proven to help people be more mindful of their surrounding, more present to their loved ones, and more relaxed in their day to day life.
For kids and adults, creativity can only improve your life. So how does skateboarding improve or develop your creativity?
Some of the development comes from the wide-open opportunity to wear a wide variety of clothes. There is no uniform for skateboarding.
Some of the development comes from the immense variety of artwork on the boards—and even the ability now to create and sell your own boards.
Another element of the development comes from being around others who are innovating, coming either arial maneuvers or street tricks to form and shape their style of skating.
I personally think a majority of the benefit of skateboarding comes from the limits that are imposed on you from the outset. You are limited in what you can do at first—gotta learn to stand before you can fly.
Then, you are limited by how fast you can move. Developing the balance to move quick enough to pull off a kick flip is vital or your going to be hurting a lot.
Then, you are limited by where you can skate for a time. Avoid down hills and public parks until you have things under control.
The more you challenge and overcome the limits, the more creative you are becoming. Your skills are building. Your tricks are becoming more complex. Your runs are longer and you can improv and vary tricks as you go.
And really, the sky is the limit.
Contrary to what many want to believe, limits help creative enterprises thrive. When we are given too much room to creative things, we tend to freeze up and blank out. But when someone hands up 9 inches by 33 inches, and says create a graphic for this board that an eighteen year old kid will want to skate, immediately we our minds start spinning, and filling in the blanks.
All great minds are creative. All great minds have to push past the limits set for them. As they do, they grow and advance, and become better people for it—for the most part.
