Clap along if you know what happiness is to you!

This week, as I was listening to Adam Savage’s Maker Faire talk, I found a lot of what he was saying really resonated with me.  Most poignantly, at the end when he was concluding his talk, he said:

“It doesn’t matter what you make and it doesn’t matter why.  The importance is that you’re making something.”

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the passion and the feeling behind his whole talk, and especially this sentiment, and I immediately knew this was what I wanted to address this week. Creating, while it is about the creation, is also about the experience, and the joy and happiness a creator gets from making something.  And no two experiences will ever be the same.  We all go about making things in different ways, whether we are re-creating something from pop culture or pulling a thought from our minds and making it real.  For example, when Adam was talking about people coming together on the Replica Prop Forum to discuss their various re-creations of the Iron Man costume, I realized that while all of these people are looking for the same end product, the way they all get there will be different.  Just because someone is making something from pop culture, it does not mean they are less creative or original: it means they’ve seen something they are so interested in, so passionate about, that they are willing to do whatever it takes to make it theirs.  So what if it isn’t their original work?  The fact is, that person is using the tools available to them, the skills they have, or possibly learning new skills, all in order to fabricate something from scratch that they can be proud of and call their own.  It’s a different type of creativity, but it is creativity nonetheless.

So while I do think that the experience varies when makers are creating something out of their imagination as opposed to something from pop culture, I think the experience honestly just varies whenever someone creates something.  No two people are alike, and no two creations will be alike, which means no two experiences will be the same.  Whatever you choose to make, you are starting with a picture in your head, or on paper, and you must plot out how to best accomplish the end product.  And therein lies the experience of planning and creating; it’s the same process whether it’s your own original work or something you want to re-create so you can have something special that you may have seen before, but you have made all on your own.  And no matter what you make, hopefully it makes you happy and you can just be proud that you made it.