I was in L.A. about three weeks back and I was hanging this handmade valance for a wedding.

The interior designer belonged to the bride – her uncle – and this guy spends his workweek making the insides of multi-million-dollar homes look gorgeous. 

There I am, up on top of this splintery pergola in my tux, telling him what a great job he did.

“It’s not me,” he’d say. “God’s the original designer.”

Now normally when I hear some weird Christianese response like that, I go on and say, “Yeah, okay, but you did a great job too.” However, I have to admit I’ve never heard a well-off interior designer make me think about the word design.

And about how I neither like nor believe in the word “creative” when applied to us.

Intuitive?

Sure, I know what you mean – people with intuitive minds like those Gladwell featured in “Blink” tend to function on a parallel wavelength to those with more rational or logical processes.

Artistic?

Sure, there’s a “fine” side to certain careers.

Makers?

Of course, we’re all making something.

But creative?

Nah. Creation assumes ex-nihilo and whether you believe in the Big Bang or some form of Theism, you assume that something (which eventually lead to us) came out of nothing.

And none of us can do that. We all start with something, be it pencil lead, pixels, or particles.

So because we’re all in the process of reshaping the world around us, we’re all “creative” – we’re all makers. The engineers at Boeing like my father-in-law make planes and tinker with workflows to make them more efficient. Elon Musk just drew up designs for that hyperlink. Legislators make order. Lawyers make cases. Chemists make cures. Accountants make me pay my bills and never have any fun.

I mean budgets. Accountants make budgets.

My father? My father built houses and power plants and roads for years, following in the footsteps of my grandfather and great-grandfather.

One of my favorite quotes says:

“The manual arts have always preceded the fine arts: someone had to build the Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo could paint it.”

Forefront’s adding a new architecture guild this fall, which is the first of many more guilds that focus on unique disciplines.

What do you make?

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