Translator: Tijana Mihajlović Reviewer: Denise RQ
What is creativity?
I thought I knew.
At least I thought I had a pretty good idea.
Until last night.
Last night, we all delivered our rehearsal talks
along with our slides,
along with my slides.
Thirty minutes later, I threw that talk away.
Why?
I threw it away because it had very little to do with real creativity.
Real creativity requires
vulnerability, it requires honesty.
Real creativity is here,
and real creativity is right in front of me.
It was 1994.
I was 21 years old, a sophomore in arts school,
and four years into my love affair with glass.
I grew up on the water in Hawaii.
Surfing was all I really knew.
Yet, here I was,
driving through the countryside of upstate New York.
I was questioning my decisions:
why I was there,
my role as an artist,
what did I want my work to say?
I was fascinated with the idea of everyday scenes,
made entirely of glass,
yet, all I could do was make a vase.
As I gazed out of the window, through the rolling hills of wheat,
just like a bullet, it hit me.
And that's when my life as a person and as an artist changed.
That's when I knew I needed to make that wheat field out of glass.
The three years that followed
were three of the most creative and difficult years of my life.
Why?
For a lot of reasons,
but primarily because not walking through those wheat fields in glass
was simply not an option.
For three years I tried and I failed.
I learned new techniques. I taught myself new techniques.
I got good at them, and I practiced them.
And ultimately, I demystified and made my first glass wheat field.
When I stood in front of that first glass wheat field,
I was a different person than when I drove by them.
When I drove by those wheat fields,
I had that idea, I questioned myself, I doubted myself.
And when I stood in front of the glass wheat fields,
I validated myself.
So fast forward 22 years,
a few of the worst years of my life,
which culminated
in the life that I built
with my wife and then business partner,
and it shattered.
And I was frightened.
I was left alone to figure out the business.
I lost my passion, I lost my hunger.
I didn’t even know where to look; it was simply gone.
Then the phone rang one day,
and it was Cat from TEDxVail,
asking me
if I would be artist-in-residence and speaker at tonight's event.
I had been running from everything that got me to that point,
and that phone call was the exact excuse I needed to stop making my excuses.
And all it took was picking up a piece of glass,
and just like the very first time I've picked up a piece of glass,
I couldn't stop.
Those last three months
have been the most hectic
and the most fulfilling three months of my life.
In those three months, I created this set design.
It's 2016 pieces of wheat made out of glass.
One week ago, I made my second raindrop.
and it was only three weeks earlier I made my first.
And the last week, I made, I believe,
somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 raindrops.
Just like I stood in front of that glass wheat field,
the person I am standing on this stage
is a more resilient and more creative person
than I was when the phone rang.
I don't know that my struggles, and my triumphs,
and my overcoming adversity
is much different than each of yours,
but I do know that creativity taught me to stretch glass,
and it taught me to stretch my mind far enough
to make my first glass wheat field and to make my first raindrop.
My hope for each of you
is that you can find your raindrop
and your wheat field,
and to not accept no,
and to never compromise when it comes to creativity.
Thank you.
(Applause)