Michelangelo said, "Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it." To me, that's the essence of creativity. You're not creating something from nothing. You're just discovering what God has already created.
When I'm designing products in my work as a mechanical engineer, I don't believe that I'm creating anything. I can't create. Instead, I'm simply opening my eyes to recognize an order, a harmony, an alignment of ideas, that's already present. I may have to go through a process to get there. But that process really has to do with peeling back the layers of limitation that I've placed on myself or on others.
And when I do solve a problem, at that moment the solution seems like the most obvious idea in the world. That's how I know it isn't my own. When something is that right, that perfect, how could anyone but God have created it?
