Negativity seeds creativity

Necessity is the mother of invention. All negativity can be the fuel for a new possibilities. Negativity is like the black soil that provides a base for the rose to grow, or it’s like the black oil that runs your motor car, or like the black liquorice that gets you through that late afternoon slump. I know, I know, now I’m mixing bad metaphors.

But if you think back on challenging experiences personally, in your community or in history, you can almost always see how they seeded something new and creative. At the personal level, I can think of the time I bought all that Nortel stock just before it tanked. It motivated me to learn about real estate investing, which I grew to love. Many historians say that the Renaissance in Europe was seeded by the Plague. One third of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages died from the Plague. The surviving relatives took their inheritances and funded scientists, inventors and artists to help their society re-invent itself so that something like the Plague wouldn’t happen again.

Times of crisis are easiest to convince people (or yourself) to try something new, because clearly the old just isn’t working anymore.