My creativity advent calendar 2024: Day 23.

If you knew you couldn’t fail, would you try to be more creative?

Henry Ford famously said “Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you’re right”.

Poinsetta — Crayon drawing by Ann Hawkins

I’ve scattered a few of my drawings throughout these posts, mostly to remind myself that if I spent more time practicing I could probably get a lot better.

It’s not fear of failure that stops me tho, it’s more that I’d rather spend time reading (and writing about what I’ve read).

However, if there’s something nagging away at you that you’d really like to do, take heart that it’s rarely ever too late to give it a go.

Here are some people who took a while to warm up but eventually produced work that other people really enjoy:

1. George Eliot was over 50 when she wrote Middlemarch.
2. Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn at age 49.
3. Chef, Julia Child, didn’t learn how to cook until her 40s, and didn’t have her television show until her 50s.
4. Actor, Alan Rickman, who played Snape in the Harry Potter films, got his first film role at 46.
5. Anna Mary Robertson Moses (Grandma Moses) started painting when she was 75 and became a famous American painter.
6. Alfred Hitchcock, made Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho between his 54th and 61st birthdays.
7. The works Cezanne created in his mid-60s are valued 15 times higher than those he created as a young man.
8. Painter, Carmen Herrera, sold her first artwork in 2004 when she was 89 years old, after six decades of private painting.
9. Sculptor, Louise Bourgeois, reached her greatest artistic success in her 70s and 80s. She died at 98, having finished one of the sculptures the week before.
10. Frank McCourt didn’t publish his first book Angela’s Ashes (which won the Pulitzer Prize) until he was 66.

Christmas tree — Ink on Card by Ann Hawkins

Now that’s not to say that if you’re a lot younger than that you should keep putting off something you really want to do, but if there is something you want to try maybe wonder why you keep putting it off.

What have you tucked away that you’d really like to try?