I spent today meeting with bookstores about my new suspense novel, The Breath of God. While there, I learned so much from the booksellers by asking questions about book marketing. For me, learning is more about questioning than answering. I learn best through exposing myself to new experiences and new ideas. This exposure to the new also sparks the creative spirit so crucial to my writing. But creativity is a necessary skill for all professions, not just those we stereotype as artistic. Creativity in science brings us iPads and new cures for diseases. In business, creativity keeps us competitive in a world where other countries produce more cheaply than we can. 

The creative process is about exploring the unknown, taking risks, and having the freedom to be wrong. In researching The Breath of God, I read over 50 books in areas I had never studied before, and then I spent a month trekking through India and the Himalayas. Creativity is not about creating an idea out of a vacuum, but about putting different pieces of a puzzle together in a new way. Later, I trashed over 300 pages of the first-draft of my novel and rewrote the remaining 400 pages many times. Thankfully, I wasn’t graded on the early drafts of the book! For me, creativity and learning are intimately related. Learning inspires the creative process, and the freedom to create drives me to learn.

About the Author: Jeffrey Small is an author, speaker, school board member, entrepreneur, and life-long student. Twitter: @jeffreysmalljr