4. Ideas Illustrated;

Written by Collyn Ahart, illustrated by Yeji Yun.

September is my favourite month. It’s the month when the duvet comes back out, the autumn fashion emerges from storage and everyone goes back to school. When it comes to New Years parties, January’s got nothing on September.
 

Design Week, Fashion Week Month, Graduate shows, Chocolate Week, and with Oktoberfest just around the corner, September is the start of all that is new and good in the world. September, for me, is about learning. And although I no longer go back to school, I try to regularly remind myself the most important pieces of advice given to me about education.

1. Look at more pictures. Especially if you deal primarily in words, buy magazines, go to galleries, waste your afternoon on Tumblr... it won’t be a waste of time.

2. Learn to hear your own voice. You have a very short period of time in which to get this right. When you learn to hear your own voice - whether in a new job or a new course in college, you set a precedent and if you hear your own voice in the first day, you’ll be able to speak up forever.

3. Ask questions, they make the conversation that much better. Whether it’s a lecture or a casual chat over coffee, you’ll remember more about what you’ve just heard if you expect yourself to think critically enough to ask a question at the end.

4. Read the physical world. A good friend of mine - a skateboarder - once told me that skateboarders read the city differently to non-skateboarders. Sidewalks and paving stones are not just street infrastructure, they see jumps, potential for joy, a playground in the making. Learning to read the physical world means training your brain to look for unconventional meaning in your environment, learning to see the happy accidents and seeing room for improvement.

5. Remember that “common sense” is a cultural construction.

6. Have conversations with people that aren’t like you. You’ll see the differences, but you’ll also find common ground... and it’s from these conversations that you’ll learn empathy, the most powerful tool in your creative arsenal.

7. Don’t limit what you think you can do to what you’ve already done. Never underestimate the power of scaring yourself into action.

8. Keen is always better than cool. Cool doesn’t care. It doesn’t get involved. Cool is unflappable and unemotional. Keen cares. Keen is passionate and nerdy. Keen will laugh and cry and own one’s emotions. Keen rules the world.

9. Play a sport. You might run a marathon. Play 5-a-side. Hike a mountain. Ride a bike. Whatever it is you do, your ability to push your body is directly related to your ability to push your mind. And you’ll sleep better.

10. Learn to switch off. Don’t be afraid; your mind will still be working away under the surface. I do some of my best thinking when I am lost out in the woods on my bicycle, concentrating on staying in a straight line, not impaling myself on a tree limb or dropping off the face of a cliff. Plan this time into your creative day, make it part of your creative process.

11. Remember the meaning of education: it comes from the Latin -duco, -ducare meaning “to lead out of.” Education is a process of leading what’s inside of you, out of you. In that sense, the job is to learn... it is not to be “taught.”

Collyn Ahart is a freelance insight, innovation and brand strategy consultant working with YCN.
Yeji Yun is a freelance illustrator, living and working in London.

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