On Sunday, a barefoot Karl Gude helped kickstart MIPA with an inspiring lecture on creativity. With experience as an illustrator for both his own children’s books as well as the Associated Press and News Week Magazine, Gude deals with the struggle of breaking the arrangement of traditional thinking.
“Our brains crave this,” Gude said, speaking about these patterns of thinking. “Our brains love doing the things we are comfortable doing.”
Success holds a different definition for all who strive for it, but all success involves stepping out of a comfort zone. Or rather, breaking away from conformity. According to a national statistic in Gude’s presentation, 98% of kindergarten students test high in creative thinking while only 2% of high school students do the same. It shows that conformity is learned as we travel through life. People learn it from peers, families, schools, and their environment in general.
Throughout his seminar, Gude used an analogy comparing traditional ideas and new ideas to a train and subsequently deviating tracks. Similarly, success in life is often compared to different paths taken by all individuals. Evidently, they intertwine.
“In the way I define success, which is to contribute to this world in meaningful ways, you need to think differently than everyone else,” Gude said.
Presenting Gude’s seminar as an opener truly allowed inspiration and motivation to spread into the crowd, setting the week off to an open minded and positive start.
Well done, Mackenzie. Excellent synopsis of my talk!
All in all I feel this is a very good article in general because the synopsis of this article was designed very well, Gude’s most inspirational quotes were shown and the summary crammed all the details into a short article so even someone who didn’t appear to the creativity seminar can understand the basic jist on the message that Mr.Gude was trying to explain to everyone during the seminar. There was also great usage of exact statistics used in this talk, the exact statistics that you used can show how much conformity that students are facing to anyone that did not appear to the seminar. It was a great article and I hope to see more of your writing soon.
Mackenzie, this article on Karl Gude’s presentation really summarized the key points well. I really noticed this when you mentioned that “success involves stepping out of a comfort zone.” That idea is definitely a major part of students becoming more creative. Gude’s thoughts about creativity are definitely important to students. Everyone needs to know that they can be comfortable being different and being creative. Overall this was a well written article.
Mackenzie, your closing sentence stood out to me, that Gude’s discussion on creative thinking helped in, “Setting the week off to an open minded and positive start.” While he looked back on traditional methods of thinking, Gude preached to the new age, our age, where creative thinking is gold. I mean, we’re journalists. We think, we question, we react. Creativity is powerful, and Gude captured its importance in his seminar. His message inspired my goals as a writer as I progress through this MIPA week, and your article reminded me of that.