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Before we take a deeper dive into the cycle of creativity, let’s take look at your purpose for adding creativity to your life.

First, let’s look at the definition of “purpose” from the Oxford American Dictionary:

“The reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists.” It is derived from propose “influenced by Latin propositus ‘put or set forth’ and Old French poser ‘to place.’ ”

When you have a purpose, you are placing or setting forth your objective or reason for doing something. It’s as though you’re reaching out and placing in front of you where you want to end up.

Think of the difference between getting into a car to just sort of drive around because you’re bored, compared to driving to the trailhead of a mountain so you can get out and climb it. Now look at the difference in your purpose for each: no real purpose in the first one, in the second you know exactly where you are going and why. You might ask, “What is the purpose for climbing this mountain?” If you ever have, you’ll know the answer instantly: exhilaration coupled with a sense accomplishment that is unmistakable. The bonus is bringing home marvelous stories and photos, adding up to quite a creative package for this purpose.

Having a purpose fires you up; lack of one leaves you lifeless. It’s an on-off switch for life. You’ll notice those times when you’re really motived by a purpose you come more alive and are more creative.

Getting Schooled by Life

My high school experience taught me a lifelong lesson about this. In my junior year, I had the opportunity to attend a prep school in Vermont, which was quite a change from the hippy school I had been going to in the mountains above the San Francisco Bay area. Friends of my family with kids my age were moving back to New England to avoid the drug scene that was raging out of control at the time, and they asked my parents if I might want to go along with them.

That summer I had been living up in the hills with friends and enjoying the essence of the California scene: sleeping under the stars among oak trees; long nights by the campfire and many trips to the Fillmore Auditorium, the iconic music venue in San Francisco that had every big name music group of the day come through its doors, including the Doors.

When my folks asked me to come home for a talk, I was apprehensive what might be in store, given my frequent shenanigans. I was sure it would somehow cut short my Peter Pan existence. But when they asked me if I wanted to go with the other family to attend high school in northern Vermont, I immediately said yes. The charm of New England and the adventure of going to a new part of the country were irresistible.

So, as the summer was ending, I cut my hair and my mom took me to Macys to get outfitted for this new preppy adventure. That was my junior year, which turned out to be the pivotal point of my high school experience. When I arrived, I found the quality of education was far superior to what I had experienced in the free-form school I had been attending.

When the school year ended, I returned to California to attend high school in the fall with over two thousand students. Compared to the prep school with only a few hundred kids, it seemed like an impersonal factory. The school looked and felt like prison to me with its unimaginative cinder block construction, loud class bells, and sterile learning environment. Compounding this was the curriculum for my senior year—essentially what I had just eagerly embraced in Vermont in my junior year. It felt like a massive rehash, and I was getting capital B for bored with trouble on its way from an antsy teenager.

This all added up to a miserable imploding scene for me, and I was ready to do something desperate. I dreamed of the country-wide crisscrossing journeys of Jack Kerouac in On the Road, taking my camera and a backpack and heeding Bruce Springsteen’s compelling command: “We gotta get out while we’re young, ’cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run.”

Sizing up my options, I decided the best thing for me was to drop out of high school and hit the road. You can only imagine how my well-educated parents responded to this “bright” idea of mine. After a few “sick days” and a lengthy battle, the verdict came from my dad: “Marc, go back to school!”

I did, but not without a prolonged pout where I spoke as few words to my parents as possible. I could have won an award for my superbrat performance. Finally, after a week of this slow torture, my father said he couldn’t go on like this and would I please knock it off and get back to the family too. He was a very hardworking and dedicated MD with a strong family practice. What really reached me about his appeal was when he said it was affecting his ability to care for his patients. That little recognition of a higher purpose than mine pulled me out of my funk.

But going back to the factory-school wasn’t any easier nor the outcome any better, so my wheels kept spinning. I was like a junkyard dog with a bone on the other side of the fence asking myself, “How can I get out?”

Somehow, I got the idea to check up on my credits for graduation, and lo and behold, I found that after the first semester of my senior year, which was about to close, I would only need one more social studies class to graduate! And at about the same time one of the teachers there was getting ready to take a few high school students to Mexico to work on a project building a medical dispensary in the very remote Sierra Madre Mountains above Mazatlán.

I spoke with him, and he said I could go along with the other two or three if my parents and the high school were okay with it. Now, here I was going back into the line of fire, but at least this time I actually had a sensible plan to graduate instead of just dropping out. Now my strategy was to convince my parents and the high school principal to allow me use this Mexico trip in lieu of attending the final senior semester

.

My Great Escape

In one of the best sales jobs of my life, I made an appointment to speak to the principal of my dreaded school and gave him my pitch, which came out all in a nervous rush. After I had delivered it, breathless, with no more to say, I sat back and waited to hear his response. He took a long time, removing his glasses and cleaning them slowly, as though they were somehow essential to what he was about to say. My stomach was turning and I felt slightly nauseous; so much was riding on what was about to be said. In the vacuum of his silence my thoughts rushed in to fill it: I wondered, what is he thinking over anyway? How to get this wild-eyed kid back in line? Did this call for some sort of discipline for trying to break out? Or something even worse, like extending my sentence another year?

After a pause of what seemed like eternity, he put his glasses back on and looked right at me, and very softly said, “Son, I think that could work.”

Inside I was beyond ecstatic saying to myself, Holy crap! Did he really say yes? Does he know what he’s agreeing to? Outside, I did what any good salesman does when he closes the deal of his life: played it cool and acted like it was no big deal but was cautiously appreciative.

I only had a week or two to go until the semester was over, and then I was free to jump on this project. Instantly I was filled with a sense of purpose: Not just the freedom from the sentence I had received but, even more importantly, I was operating on a real purpose to help others by building the medical dispensary. The following days were a thrill of this new beginning—getting ready for this adventure, which proved to be hugely successful in terms of a rich experience in a third-world environment, and helping people who had no other source of medical care.

But there was major bonus: My Uncle Sambo had recently gifted me his Rolleiflex twin-lens camera. I brought it along and, coupled with my newfound purpose, I returned home at the end of this trip deeply tanned with dozens of rolls of exposed film that turned out to be some of the best photos of my life. I was able to enter the lives of these people, rather than just get snapshots as an outsider.

These were some of my life-lessons from this experience:

1.My protests and urge to flee the misery of high school prison didn’t get me out, in fact I was more trapped and cut off than ever.

2.Light began to dawn only when I stopped trying to escape and began to research and really look at my options.

3.Tapping into the purpose to help others was what finally opened all the doors; even the principal couldn’t say no.

4.I learned that I had to work much, much harder for this taste of freedom. In high school I was loafing along, ninety percent asleep. In Mexico it was raw manual labor from dawn to dusk: cutting trees, making adobe, lifting, carrying, sawing, trying to speak a language that I so sloppily tossed off back in school. But this hard work made me strong mentally, physically, and spiritually.

5.I was rewarded immensely by capturing some of my best photographic work and finding a new level of creativity.

6.And finally, I learned problems were solvable, not by running away but by looking for a real solution. I was only able to realize this after I had decided to work on a higher purpose—to help the people of this remote region in Mexico.

If you have any areas where you feel trapped and miserable, where your only road out seems to be to escape (and even that is blocked), where the romance of leaving seems to be calling, I invite you to look to renewed purpose as the solution.

By identifying your purpose and passion for having a more creative life you can open the doors and let the warm breeze of life flow in.

But before I try telling you a lot of BS about how perfect it will be for you from there on out, let me tell you what you already know: it is much harder work and much more challenging. But when you identify and follow your purpose, you know you are alive and will have strength to make it through the challenges that the world throws your way.

Summarizing

1.What does the word “purpose” mean to you?

2.What is an example of when you were being aimless or wandering?

3.What’s an example of a time you were very much focused on your purpose?

4.Have you had a time of misery and entrapment, where there seemed to be no open doors?

5.What was your solution?

6.How could you solve it now?

Application

1.Write down a purpose you could have for creativity.

2.What creative activity or activities do you want to pursue? Write one of them down very specifically.

3.Write three excuses you’ve used for not doing it.

d.

e.

f.

7.Write down three specific actions you can do now to strengthen your purpose in this area.

h.

i.

j.

5. Now carry them out. How did that feel?

6. What was the result of this action series?