Publish365 016: The Creative Cork
I’m a very simple person when it comes to my creativity and how I learn my processes. I don’t need step by steps or detailed instructions often, sometimes I just need to remove the block to understanding things. One of my favorite applications, Fusion360, is notoriously complicated. In fact, people have invested hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars to learn all the features and many of the people I know who have done that just end up giving up at some point.
I took one of those courses a few years ago from a maker who teaches Fusion360 courses (in this case on Skillshare) and it was amazing for me. I could move around Fusion360 very well, but there were things about Fusion that I just didn’t understand, mainly because I tried learning it on my own as I watched YouTube videos where people used it (but didn’t always explain what they were doing). It got me a long way but the course I took filled in some many gaps that it changed everything for me, and after the course it was like the floodgates opened. All the things I wanted to make on my own and 3D print went from “eventually I’ll do that” to “done” in a very short period of time.
One of my favorite stories is how when I came home from the hospital after my surgery I was given a feeding tube with a pump and the screen light stayed on all night making it nearly impossible to sleep. I took a photo of the pump face on, brought it into Fusion360, modeled a cover and 3D printed it. When my visiting nurse came by I showed it to her and she was amazed because so many people she worked with had the same pump and the same problem! Of course it didn’t result in any sales of the cover but it definitely helped me sleep!
I had a rough idea of how to do things like this before the course, but after the course it became second nature. Since the course whenever I needed to model something or design something, I just do it. I don’t “think about it” or try to find an alternate method; I just pop up Fusion360 and go to work. That little bit of education and those gaps being filled in completely took me to the next level and now I have another tool in my tool belt that gives me the ability to express my creativity much more easily than before.
If you are feeling a creative block (which we all do as makers and creatives) then maybe it isn’t that you have no ideas, it’s that you’re stuck on a good way to execute the ideas you have. I didn’t realize how strong that stuck feeling was until it went away, and boy did it go away. A few weeks ago I took a second course from I Like To Make Stuff and it uncorked even more ideas on how to use this program I was already pretty familiar with. Now I’m in the mode of consuming as much as I can about Fusion360 to keep my creativity flowing.
Hopefully this will inspire you to explore avenues of unblocking your creativity through education as well!
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