I’ve been thinking about how much our lives are shaped by the patterns in our minds, by what we believe, how we see the world, and what we choose to do with it. That’s really at the heart of what I explore through Maktoub Studio: the idea that we craft our life every day through thought, intention, and action.
When those three fall out of sync, usually it is because we stop creating not just art or ideas, but meaning itself. So to stay alert (and sane) I keep one day a week purely for creative exploration, with no pressure to make the day “useful.”
Creativity is the muscle, one that keeps us curious, adaptive, and alive. It’s how we solve problems, it’s also how we raise our kids, build teams, and shape our days. And when that muscle weakens, everything starts to feel smaller.
Here are 3 things I wanted to share:
1️⃣ The World Is Playing It Too Safe
I came across an article entitled The Decline of Deviance, in which Adam Mastroianni argues, backed with data, that we’ve become too well-behaved. It surprised me! Can you imagine that we are less daring, less curious and less original than our elders. Not just in art, but in how we think and live our lives.
He shows how we plan a lot more, take less risks, and polish everything to fit into a vision (ours or others’). It also shows how all that safety is quietly draining our creativity, the same creativity that helps us see new solutions, build better ideas, and keep our daily lives interesting.
That’s why I keep returning to The Medina Path as a simple framework to help me make creativity into a way of walking through life, especially when I approach any new reflection or envision a project. The Fall newsletter says more about it, if you missed it you can access it here
So if we want to stay imaginative, in our work, our homes, our relationships, we have to let a bit of risk back in. And I love that idea, because it both allows us to stretch the width of our life and take responsibility for our choices!
2️⃣ What My 13-Year-Old Taught Me About Creativity
I’ve been working on a new project with my self-appointed Creative Director, my 13-year-old son, Selim.
Watching him is like holding up a mirror to my own creative habits. He’ll start an idea, dive in with full focus, then -without hesitation- abandon it the moment it stops feeling true. No long debate, just letting curiosity lead the way.
The Gen-Xer in me twitched. “But we already started down this route. We should finish it.” He didn’t care, for him moving on isn’t giving up; it’s staying honest with the idea. He trusts that the next version might be closer to what he really envisions.
The agility experts call it failing fast. It’s also the himma, or inner flame, I so often talk about. The kind that makes you open to discovery, rather than cling to outcomes. For Selim, creativity is less about committing to one idea, and more about staying in relationship with a process.
That’s a lesson that stretches beyond making art, it is how we grow as people too? Whether we’re building something, raising someone, or simply figuring out what’s next, life asks for the same mindset:
Show up, experiment, and keep learning as you go.
3️⃣ Breaking the Scripts I Grew Up With
Over the last years, I’ve been working through the invisible “scripts” I inherited. Maybe you have inherited them too. You know those quiet rules that shape how we think, behave, and speak. Beliefs we didn’t choose but learned to live by, because they kept us safe, praised, or accepted… but also tend to keep us small and unlearning them isn’t easy (sigh!). Here’s one of them:
“Don’t make mistakes”… and if you do, don’t show it.
We talk a lot about “learning from failure,” but most of us still hide our mistakes. At school, mistakes meant you weren’t good enough and at home, they carried quiet shame. In my culture, there’s a saying that goes something along the lines of “If you fall, pretend you meant to crawl.” I’ve seen it at work too, for example in reports to funders, failure was never encouraged unless we polished it into a “success” story.
That’s how we stop experimenting, how we plan ourselves into inaction or wait for perfect conditions that never come, because “perfect”, well, is a perspective. Albeit, along the way, we forget how to learn by doing.
But creativity depends on mistakes, every new idea or small leap forward is shaped by trial and error. Whether we’re running a business, raising a family, or finding your next path, growth always looks messy up close.
Curiosity teaches faster than perfection ever will, so my invitation to myself this week is to try something that stretches my creative muscle as a way to stay open to possibility. Will you join me?
If something here spoke to you, I’d love to hear which part.
Heartfully,
Ratiba
