Try to imagine your current life and work without creativity.
What would that look like?
For starters, you'd probably lose your phone immediately,
and almost all the games that you might enjoy playing would disappear.
All of your favorite apps would likely look the same,
and your clothes bland and boring.
You might even wear the same thing every day, like a cartoon
character or Mark Zuckerberg.
But in this hypothetical reality, things would decline even further.
Everyone would be the same.
It would be really boring.
Nothing interesting and nothing new would exist anywhere.
No one would be able to improve on the circumstances that they were born with.
People would feel stuck.
And as a society, we would be behind with technology.
Actually, as a matter of fact, we might not even have computers
or technology in the first place.
Or creativity not to exist.
Now you may be thinking, okay... I can see this
being true with some things, but technology that's way too far a stretch.
You don't need creativity for a technology.
But I'd like to remind you about what I said in my last video on creativity.
Creativity goes far beyond visual arts.
Being creative is generating ideas and using your imagination
to create new ways to solve problems.
With this video.
I want to prove to you how incredibly important creativity
is in our everyday lives and even so much more with our artwork.
There's a huge chance that you're taking creativity way too lightly right now.
As a matter of fact, finding solutions to complex new problems
is one of the first of three ways that creativity is extremely beneficial to you.
You essentially become a master problem solver.
Creativity opens your mind and keeps it active.
It allows you to see things in new ways that you haven't seen before.
What that looks like is taking in knowledge
from past experiences and using them in new ways.
Taking a new perspective on everything around you.
I'll give you an artistic example.
One of the many ways that I use creativity is with the tools
that I have at my disposal to solve issues with my artwork.
My favorite is using a filtering app on my artwork at different stages.
I like to soften hard edges using the clarity slider,
which also merges any awkward color and lighting mistakes I have done.
This helps me harmonize everything since I tend to focus on the small details
and when I zoom out, things look kind of wonky.
I am often inspired to take things in a unique direction from there,
which is what happened with one of my most popular pieces, Contact Misfit.
So that was just one example of how you can use
an essentially unlimited amount of tools to your advantage.
The only problem is that you really need to get rid of limiting beliefs
in order to do this. Biases and shame.
They prevent you from having the creativity
to see a solution to a problem that you might have, just like I did.
Now, not all creativity is going to lead to innovation within your own work.
Please remember that it is a muscle that grows when exercised and stressed.
So experiment and make mistakes now and embrace that freedom of clarity
to see new opportunities around you in the future.
Another way to look at solving problems is by looking at them as opportunities.
When you embrace creativity in your life, you'll have an ability to think
outside the box and see things that other people don't.
You'll essentially become a creator of your own luck.
A good example of this
in my own life are a few of the sponsors on my YouTube channel.
Oftentimes, the best ones come from seemingly random scenarios.
For my last video, for example, I simply commented
on someone else's sponsored video here on YouTube,
and the sponsor somehow noticed me and reached out wanting to work with me.
That sponsor ended up being more lucrative than 99% of the requests I get via email
every day.
Looking back, I was just in a good mood and I wanted to share
the good experiences I had with that sponsor to help other people.
And we'll talk more about being in a good mood in a moment.
That was an unconscious example.
I didn't really intend for that to happen.
So let's look at my entire channel as a whole.
Ergo Josh,
I intentionally knew that someone with my skill level, subject matter,
skin color and personality was something
that wasn't really common out there on YouTube back in 2017, 2018.
I knew that showing my hands as I would work on my iPad would stand out.
So most of my initial videos were just like that.
Many of these videos actually have now hundreds of thousands of views.
Some even have millions.
It's easy to say that Art, YouTube or whatever you're interested in
is too saturated.
But I saw the opportunity to be creative, and I think all of you
would agree that it resulted in a huge success today.
So what can you do?
Well, you can make art for communities that aren't usually seen
in a visually creative manner.
For example, you might even have knowledge of places that most artists
have no clue about and dominate that space.
I know of artists growing their entire brand
from a single subreddit that they were into.
Let's say you make stickers or do jewelry.
You can wear it and represent your own stuff.
Who knows what type of potential clients you could attract with the unique spaces
that you visit and the energy that you bring to different environments.
Opportunities like this often have the chance to literally change your life.
People will ask you about how you did it, but you won't be able to give them
a clear path to replicate your success because that opportunity was tailored
for you in that moment over a long span of time.
You've probably experienced this if you've
talked to any of your favorite artists before and try to get them to tell you
how they got there.
You might even say that you created that opportunity yourself.
At this point,
you're starting to realize just how easy it is to be an artist,
and you stop worrying about people copying you or finding out the,
quote unquote secrets, deep secrets to your success.
Now, for the second reason that creativity
is so important, all of that was just the ability to see more around you,
see more potential, more opportunities, more ways to solve a problem.
But now we're going to talk about
how it's pretty much the main way that you stand out among a crowd.
You often hear about people saying that X, Y, Z space
is too saturated and that nothing original exists anymore.
And there is some truth to that.
But it simply does not have to be your experience.
If you learn to work in harmony with your creativity,
basically creativity allows you to express something
in a truly unique and original way because you put yourself into it.
And there was never another you before.
As a matter of fact,
the more creative you allow yourself to be, the more unique you become.
Creativity is such an amazing thing that it separates
the ordinary from the excellent.
But what's really cool is that it's also the very means
by which you can start that journey to become extraordinary.
Very soon you'll be leaving indelible imprints on everything that you touch.
Then the most common way
you'll start to notice this is when people start talking about your art style.
But you feel like you don't even have one yet.
One example of how I used creativity to stand out
was with my recent painting of Lucy from Edge Runners.
The main element that everyone was attracted to was her jacket.
How did I do it?
It looks so pretty.
Well, I search for photos of iridescent plastic
and just overlaid it onto my drawing.
But that wasn't even really the main thing of why it did well.
I took it even further and post an character in the actual video
game to use as reference.
I could change the camera angles and everything and it made it
really easy to get the lighting and environment done quickly.
But guess what?
That's still not even the main thing for why it was successful.
I decided to portray the deepest moody
as the moment of sorrow and depression from the show,
and that is the final ingredient that made my artwork stand out.
I took personal elements in art that I've been interested in
since over ten years ago and applied it to this painting.
So in a field of other
Lucy fan art online, there was room for me to enjoy success.
Sure, there's plenty of artists who are better than me.
Way better.
There's lots of things I love to fix with it, but it did so
well on every social platform that I shared it on.
And it was also one of my best sellers at LightBox Expo.
That's what I'm talking about. Me.
I want you to look at what's happening in the broader industry as an example.
So studios and companies like CD, Projekt, Red and Riot Games,
they're creating so many different versions
of their intellectual property IP's for people to consume.
So if you watched Arcane, you might enjoy League of Legends and vice versa.
If you liked The Witcher three game, which I did.
You'll probably watch The Witcher live action show on Netflix
or vice versa if you enjoyed watching Edge Runners.
You'll probably try playing the game.
It was based on Cyberpunk 2077.
You might even read the comic.
You might even watch the movie. That might come out one day.
You might even buy the DLC that's coming out.
So what you're seeing is that the love and care that they put into these
franchises is really the final touch that makes them so much money.
But you have to be really creative to make all of these things work together well.
Because let's be honest, there's so many shitty adaptations out there
that no one cares about.
Now, the biggest reason to be creative
is that it's just a fantastic way to live life.
It's you being you.
You experience life to the fullest,
and you become a master of being in the moment.
You have a potential to become the most successful version of yourself
while your creative,
and that's not even by anyone else's terms of success but yours.
This is why children are seen as such wonderful creative spirits.
They're always living in the moment, usually free from fear, shame and guilt
that we usually pick up as we grow older.
Reading from a place of flow when you're fully experiencing
everything around you in that moment, complete focus
brings you to your truest form of expression.
You can let go of your art, needing to perform a simple task all the time,
and you can let go of fears of people and things replacing you
when you're creating in the moment, it just feels good.
And when you feel good, you make good decisions
and you increase your self-confidence as well.
So you start to do and say things that you wouldn't normally,
but hopefully they become normal.
And then everyone around you,
whether they're conscious of it or not, absolutely loves that about you.
Trust me, I've seen this happen for myself and others many times over.
So if you're feeling worried about finding out how important
creativity is, please don't worry.
Watch my first video explaining what creativity is and why everyone can have it.
I've been Ergo Josh
Josh.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.
Keep drawing and stay positive. Peace.