Have you discovered your creativity?

Do you remember an incident where you solved a specific problem and the Aha moment came much later?

You come across a standard technique much later in your life that prescribes how that kind of a problem can be solved, and you had used a similar one without knowing that existed.

The feeling that comes at that moment that you are also capable of creating has an incredible impact on your self-esteem.

Let me share the experience that continues to excite me though it happened 25 years ago. This incident is full of technical details. Let me try to keep it as simple as possible.

My final year engineering project was about remote communication. I did not know anything about networking or communication at that time. The project was about connecting two computers using a serial port cable and executing commands issued from one computer on the other. I used C language on the DOS platform. The program had a prompt where I could issue DOS shell kind of commands. The commands were transferred to another computer where the other program interpreted the commands, execute and send the results back. Some of the commands also had one or two arguments that should be encoded and sent out.

I struggled a lot to complete the project with hardly any guidance, but finally, it was a grand success. Later years when I started working at Novell Software India Ltd, I had an opportunity to work on IPX/SPX and TCP/IP protocol stack and wrote draft RFCs.

When I looked back at my college project implementation, I realized my project had a shell, a defined protocol, encoding, decoding, parsing logic, and a lot more. I am sure it was not perfect, but without even knowing any of these standard concepts, my mind was able to conceive these ideas.

When this kind of experience repeats, and if you can observe, you will realize creativity as one of your strengths.

Strengths discovery is not an easy process, but we should explore ways to uncover our hidden strengths.