Seth Godin's Brainwashed was a very interesting and true article about the difficulty of being creative in today's world. He introduces seven things to utilize and make ourselves better, more innovative people.
One of those things is to acknowledge the lizard. The lizard is the prehistoric part of our brain that tells us to adapt to what is safe, which inherently will tend to avoid wanting to make art and be innovative and go with what is "safe" to get a job. He tells us we need to acknowledge that this part of our brain is there so that we can ignore it and trust our instincts to be something beyond what society wants us to be.
He also explains that shipping will help us surpass that instinct because that is the singular action that will make us and our talents vaulable as well as irreplacable in the creative field. Aside from simply doing something, shipping is the action of putting it out there and not being afraid, because fear will get us nowhere.
I believe that the seventh is the most important and what ties into everything we will ever need to know, and that is to learn. Learning allows us to build basically everything-- our thoughts, opinions, creativity, and deterrents from what we have known to not be successful. All we have to do to learn is open our eyes, ears, and thoughts and let go of the lizard!


In relation to the blog assignments, I find them to be mostly a waste of time, or more so just like busy work. In order to be creative, you have to create, and as simple as that sounds we don't really create anything with the blogs. From my perspective, the blogs are a cut and dry assignment with length requirements and topic parameters. They are not something I have noticed to be helpful in my creative endeavors, nor have I really thought twice about them after they have been completed.
As I stated in the previous topic, learning is the basis for everything, and with the blogs we aren't really encouraged to learn so much as just to fulfill a requirement. A major suggestion I would have is to make the blogs more open topic-wise, and more free requirement-wise. For example, it would be helpful for a blog topic to be something like "What is an area of video/audio/animating/etc. that you are interested in or curious about? Research it and write what you have learned."
That would really give me the opportunity to explore my interests and learn something I wanted to learn that could later really help me out. For example, if the topic of the week was audio, I would have the opportunity to learn a little more about it and what goes into audio production in the industry. This would make me more literate when communicating with the audio people when I am working on set and would allow me to understand it a little better myself.
I have always found that the best way to learn something is to teach it. So by researching a topic and writing about it as if you were teaching it to your reader, you would both really help yourself as well as have a useful sort of manual for future reference for youself. It would also help you to explore areas in those fields that you would have not thought twice about, or help you realize something new about a field you already thought you knew a lot about.