What oranges taught me about the creative process 🍊
Today I want to share a story from my travels. A story of oranges, processes, learnings and perceptions. A small moment that has–forever–altered the way I look at things. 🍊
When I visited Morocco with family, a few years ago, we were offered oranges after a meal. The oranges themselves were nothing extraordinary but what stuck with me was the way they were served. The locals sliced the oranges in circular segments, placed them in a neat pile on a platter and dusted them with cinnamon. When compared to the way I was used to having them, I realised that, even though I was eating the same fruit, the way I was experiencing it was very different.
Now, please bare with me–I have to talk about oranges for a bit longer. When I was growing up, my grandfather had a second, countryside house, and had planted a few orange trees. I can recall him sitting on a wooden stool, slicing the skin away, peeling it off and pulling the segments of the fruit apart. He would offer them to me, one by one. And so I grew up thinking that there is one way to eat an orange–the way my grandfather taught me.
However, there’s hardly only one way of doing things. Sometimes we think we know how things are done, because we’ve done them that way for so long that they seem like solid truths on the process is. Well, what if we didn’t know? Imagine you had never eaten an orange before. If I was to give you one, how would you eat it? Would you bite the skin off? Would you slice the skin and then take a bite of the whole fruit without segmenting it? Or would you slice it into circles and serve it with cinnamon?
Much like my perception on how to eat an orange, the creative process we follow is an inherited ‘solid truth’. We never question it. It was given to us by other creatives before us and we follow it because it works. But what if there’s a better way of serving that process? What if by following the same steps exactly as they were handed down to us, we never stop to question whether there is a different way?
Sometimes, in order to see something differently, you need to look at it without any prejudices and predispositions. Pull yourself away from it. Imagine that you know nothing. And start from there. Take a step forward and find the wonder in rediscovering and refining the way you do things.
It’s not about changing what you serve. It’s about changing the way you serve it, the way it’s experienced by others, the way it’s delivered. Maybe you’ll get to discover a new way to serve an orange.
Maybe you’ll find something even better…
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