I'm gonna talk to you about creation. Most of us believe ourselves incapable of creating anything new or fun or exciting. 'Oh that's for the art types', or 'That's for someone smarter than me', or 'I never finish projects', right? That's exactly what I thought, sitting in my chair and whiling away the hours on the Internet, looking at and learning about all these wonderful creations that it allows me to see and share in. And I couldn't but think, looking at all these incredible things that others have made, "I wish I could do that." That's a phrase every one of us at some point and time have thought at one point or another, right? What I'm here to ask you is this: What's stopping you? What is stopping each and every single one of you from sitting down with a book and some materials and actually making something? The answer is nothing. You have absolutely no reason not to sit down and let your natural creativity pour into something.

Now at this point and time, you'll probably be saying, "But Ophanim, I'm just not creative like those people!" and I call bull♥♥♥♥. There is not a single person on this planet that can say he or she has never had an original idea or thought. Everyone has to want to make something at some point. Human beings just love to create. Look back at all the incredible history that we as a people have, and the incredible beauty that human minds have produced. The Mona Lisa, David, or even something slightly more modern like the Sydney Opera House. Looking at these works of beauty, these creations that these artists have absolutely poured their soul into, you can not tell me that you can belong to the same species as the artists and not have a spark of creativity.

And all it takes is a spark. That tiny little spark can awaken your creativity. And when the door is open you'll be shocked at the absolute flood of ideas. Take me for example. I wasn't a particularly creative person. I mean, I've got the drawing talent of a fish. But then I got an idea. A dice roll script, made in Perl. Perl, being a relatively simple language, was a good language to do it in. So I did it. It took me a few hours, but I did it. The code was sloppy and the commenting was non-existent, but damn it I was proud.

And that's all it took. That one little project, that one little moment during which I positively beamed with pride. I had done it. I'd gone through the process, I did my work, and it worked. That was about a week ago. Since then, I've written the licensing topic and this letter to you, improved my fire-breathing, improved my contact juggling, and actually started learning things. And the best part is actually the learning. Instead of skimming over papers, I read them, and try to understand their contents. When Stumbleupon feeds me TED talks, I listen, and I make an effort to take something from them. I listen, I read, I learn, I do, and I think.

And that's all I want you to do. Just make one thing. Something simple, something with a definitive outcome. Make a Perl script, learn Bash, read a book on Mathematics, learn to do something utterly and completely useless which serves no purpose except entertainment. And I think you'll find that one simple step, that one little act of creation is enough to get the ball rolling. And who knows what you'll do from there?

I instantly thought "Oh crap, religion flame war".

But anyway, I totally agree with what he's talking about; it can even be as simple as doodling notes in a little notepad, a wonderful tool I say, until you start writing stuff that you like. Just because the first thing you make isn't as good as what other people release doesn't mean you're worse than them, it just means they've been doing longer than you - if you compared numgun's first mod to anyone else's first mod I'm willing to bet that they'd be roughly the same quality: unreleasable.

When you do your first number change in a .ini file and it does something fun in-game: don't say it was a fluke - it's not, because you can replicate it. If it crashes your computer it's not because you're a bad modder, it's because you got unlucky and changed the wrong value.

It also helps to remember that errors tend to be more useful to the learning process than success.

The more errors you know the more errors you know how to fix is generally the case.

again, nice work. i applaud your literary style, conversational but in this case, informative and motivational. in any case, hopefully this gets me actually doing things again. forsakengeti.deviantart.com - last update a month or so ago <_<
at least im working well on homework and learning lua at a decent rate. i actually get tables now

Well, I mentioned the TED talks. They're very obviously influencing my writing. I knew it'd happen, which is why I intro'd with "I'm going to talk to you about...", which is what speakers tend to do.

I really hope some *cough* of those people on these forums read this.

I've already known this for a good while and I believe anyone is capable of doing anything they want as long as they think in right manner and have motivation and interests for that "anything" part.

I'm always making things, all kinds of art and I do coding too. I've been working on a game for a few months (it was started almost a year ago when I started learning how to code in C++, I only started working on it really in semptember-ish. The first alpha should be released soonish, but I've been saying that for a while lol). I'm constantly designing games. I have a tub of high quality plasticine and tools that I used for claymations (but unfortunately my cousin robbed my digital cam about a year ago for a school project and I haven't seen it since). I have a slab of air drying clay that I've never really used, but helped my sister make something with once.

TBH I try to do too many things at the same time so everything gets delayed and I often start working on new things during the middle of other projects.

Today I'm going to buy some equipment to make something mechanical actually, involving magnets and other materials, and I'm going to buy a mechanical pencil as suggested by krumbs and other equipment. When I'm older I'd love to be either an inventor or a games designer.

People try to take on big projects before they know how to take on the little projects first.

If there's one thing you'll never regret doing, it's learning to do something well.

First of all a small rant about maths. I wouldn't suggest learning most things from a maths book (school math class book), except trigonometry, and Pythagoras theory as they are almost the only things that have a practicle day to day use in a maths book. Although I do still remember the quadratic formula because of a song the teacher showed up on the computer (-b +-sqrroot(b^2 -4ac))/2a from memory, which I have never even SEEN in use outside a maths lesson.

Secondly we MOSTLY do everything for entertainment in modern societies. jeeeze guys calm down about the bare necessities being the first thing on the priorities list.

Lastly in the end you get more entertainment and value something more the better it has been done, so why not excel at it?

Good topic, I enjoyed reading it and totally agree. Motivation is the hard part, but once you get that first taste of pride in your work it becomes very addictive.

hell yes, theres something magnificently satisfying in doing something well.

Second statement is incorrect; Our primary directive is survival, not entertainment :P As for your first point, you just don't know the maths and don't find uses for them. If you have the skill, you'll usually find a use for it. And besides, it's not how useful it is. It's the actual process of learning.

True, survival is a primary directive, but it is much rarer that survival is an unstable part of modern life in much of America, Europe and Australia.
Also, maths has plenty of uses, why in this very forum people are using somewhat complex trigonometry in modding.