Back to School, Back to Creativity (Episode 62) explores designing a “School of Creativity” that adapts to diverse learning styles, prioritizes psychological safety, and blends books, mixed-media paths, live mentorship, and real-world skills—from 80/20 clinics to an angel investing track and Hillary’s “CAD Coven” for soft skills in AutoCAD—with community, access, and follow-up at the core. Visit creativeworkhour.com.

Greg
00:00 - 00:24
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the creative work hour podcast. Today is August the 16th 2025. This is episode 62 and we're talking about back to school and back to creativity and things of that nature. It is back to school season and everyone's going back to school and getting all those good deals on notebooks and everything else like that but today's title is back to school back to creativity.

Greg
00:24 - 00:43
If you could design your own school of creativity What classes or experiences might you include? Alessandra, we were talking about this before, and we were talking about actually investing and classes on investing and one thing and another. And you had mentioned the term angel investing, which I'm unfamiliar with that. You were telling me briefly.

Greg
00:44 - 00:53
I guess Devin has been looking at classes on angel investing, and we were talking about even building your own community. Devin, do you want to explain what angel investing is?

Devin
00:53 - 01:19
Angel investors are the earliest investors in a startup. So after the founder has used his or her own funds and tapped most of their friends and family, the first outside investors are typically angel investors, which just simply means they're individuals. It's not a firm like a VC firm, a venture capital firm. It's just individuals who That's what they do.

Devin
01:19 - 01:29
They give their own money and they put it into startups they believe in and hope to hit a home run, hope to be one of the Uber investors.

Greg
01:29 - 01:40
Yeah, because I had mistakenly thought that an angel investor was someone that came when something was at death's door. and preventing it from being deceased.

Devin
01:40 - 02:02
They may also do that. I mean, you know, just because they give money early doesn't mean they don't also give money late in the process. So they can come back around and have and be involved in multiple rounds. But, you know, if you go to the typical life cycle, it's self-funded, friends and family, angel, venture capital, and then, you know, going public or being acquired.

Greg
02:03 - 02:15
So what we were talking about was school of creativity and designing your own school. So would that be something that if you could design your own school of creativity, angel investing would be on the curriculum? Yeah, I

Devin
02:16 - 02:34
mean, it's one of the spokes on my wheel. I imagine my creative interest as being spokes on a wheel and in that it rotates. And so something will come up and I will really zero in on that. And that's the, you know, the creative obsession of the day.

Devin
02:35 - 02:59
And we're talking about this because that's the spoke that I'm on. And so, you know, my school of creativity, it has a well stocked library, because that's how I get excited about and start Learning about whatever it is. I want to learn about I go grab I go to a bookstore I go to a library. I start looking at online books or audiobooks.

Devin
02:59 - 03:02
I go get a book That's just how I'm wired the first

Greg
03:02 - 03:02
thing

Devin
03:02 - 03:32
I want to do when I'm excited about something Whether it's something brand new or whether it's something that rotates around on a regular basis suddenly the next thing I have to do is get a new book and then I may I go from there, I may start looking at communities online, I may start looking at courses or, you know, YouTube series, and I'm probably going to gravitate to that, but for me, that journey always starts with a pretty, if possible, an old-fashioned, you know, book with a cover and

Greg
03:33 - 04:07
actual pages. Devin was holding a book up and it said Angel on the front there, that's absolutely fantastic. Now we have a thing, Angel's Wings, and it's something that Alessandra and I always talk about angel's wings and it goes back to it goes back to twitter spaces days and i used to get really nervous about doing a twitter space and alessandra would say just imagine your angel's wings part of you know meditation we would do and i would just picture that so it's kind of stuck over the uh over the time just reminded me of that alessandra how about you if you could design your own school of creativity what classes or experiences might

Greg
04:07 - 04:08
you include

Alessandra
04:08 - 04:50
what It is really such a fun question and I know that that most of us will pop over to a YouTube video or some such I will not Okay torture for me is a class where you have to Watch all these YouTube videos like that is torture. I do not like sitting and watching videos I love I love to learn from real people. It doesn't matter if I'm standing in the room with them or if I am in a session just like we are right now. We're using Zoom as our recording studio, right?

Alessandra
04:50 - 05:05
And from a real person in real time, that synchronous learning. excites my brain. Asynchronous learning, it takes so much energy. I'm just wiped.

Alessandra
05:05 - 05:45
So anything that I can do that's live, live sessions or a live meeting or what have you, it takes the synchronous for me to do the work. And if there's reading or writing about it or practicing about it, I dread those things too. But if I can attach the reading or the writing and the practicing to a live event, I'll be prepared for the live event, or at least I'll be sweating being prepared for the live event. And that's how my brain works, yeah.

Greg
05:45 - 05:53
Thank you, Alessandra. Hilary, how about yourself? If you were designing your own school of creativity, what classes or experiences might you include?

Hillary
05:53 - 06:01
If I were creating my own school for creativity, I would, I say go with like mixed media. So you've got everything, you

Greg
06:01 - 06:02
know,

Hillary
06:02 - 06:26
like value ladder from, you know, simple written document, you know, some real basic, you know, you're going to take the concept and you want to run with it on your own. Or you've got, then you can move up to, say, like a video. And now you've got audio and visual to help you learn. And then you can take it up to, you know, like a live interactive call.

Hillary
06:27 - 07:02
And now you've got the ability to get response back with your learning. So you've got all these tiers that you can kind of apply that would mix with different learning styles. So some people, as we've been hearing, everybody's got their own way they want to learn. So if you're going to offer, I'd say, the product of the ability to learn, you would want to offer a variety of medias to help really cater to, to let people choose how they learn or where, you know, based on where they're at in their path, because a

Hillary
07:02 - 07:23
PDF may very well be all somebody needs to get going. But for me, No, I like the interaction, you know, like reviewing a PDF before I talk to somebody helps me get familiar with whatever vernacular is about to come up. And then that helps me feel prepared. So if I am going to interact with somebody and with the ability to learn, it helps me ask better questions.

Hillary
07:23 - 08:03
And I think that would be how I would go about putting together a school And when I do do this, it will be for AutoCAD drafters to learn better tips and tricks on how to maneuver within the new professional world, how to do personal time management, and how to keep track of multiple projects and things like that to stay on top of your things, which aren't really taught in the world. You know, you often go in and when you're new to the career, they expect you to just kind of know what to do. And there's not always a lot of mentorship and guidance to really help navigate the transition.

Hillary
08:04 - 08:07
So that's going to be my future school, CAD Coven.

Greg
08:07 - 08:19
Thank you, Hillary. Yeah, I look forward to learning about that. I know that you are really very near and dear to your heart. And when you get that going, I'm sure there's probably going to be a couple of tiny desk concerts along the way.

Greg
08:19 - 08:23
We'll learn more about that. Stay tuned to this podcast. Yeah. Shadows, how about you?

Greg
08:23 - 08:29
If you're going to design your own school of creativity, what classes or experiences might you include?

Shadows Pub
08:29 - 08:39
It would not be a school. If I'm going to learn, I'm going to go for books, articles, maybe videos. Courses would be way down the list. Probably books and articles.

Shadows Pub
08:39 - 08:43
If it's something visual, then I would probably look at videos.

Greg
08:43 - 08:51
Thank you, Shadows. Bobby, how about you? If you were going to design your own school of creativity, what classes or experiences might you include?

Bobby. B
08:52 - 09:17
Thank you, Greg. You know, with all the mentoring and tutoring I do, I've, you know, played with a lot and learned with a lot. And I think there's two things Hillary touched on. One, you have to get to create programs that are going to be adaptive to all the different learning styles, rather than necessarily force students into a learning style.

Bobby. B
09:18 - 09:56
And the other is all the rich knowledge that exists in people that have experienced things in life has to be integrated. You know, getting forums, roundtables, class visits from people that have the ability to communicate what they've experienced and have enough knowledge in it but are also open to sharing. Because in group work, that's where I found that students lean a bit more forward in their seats and their face relaxes a bit more. So those, to me, would be two key elements in my school of creativity.

Bobby. B
09:57 - 10:09
The last one, Edwin warned that, is accessibility. Make it clear. Be generous. And if you're going to excite a spark, in someone's mind.

Bobby. B
10:10 - 10:18
Try and make yourself available for the follow-up questions or thoughts, one through a million, that they may have. That's mine.

Greg
10:18 - 10:40
Thank you, Bobby. I know when I think about my style of learning, I'm a very visual person. Video, audio is a great way for me. I learned a trick, and a lot of people are using AI And one of the tricks I've learned was using the Pareto principle, where 80% of the outcome comes from 20% of the input.

Greg
10:40 - 11:07
So the 80-20 rule, and that's like 80% of the understanding of the subject comes from 20% of the content, right? So if we can figure a way to try and learn that most important 20%, view that as a way of like cutting out the filler and the fluff and the You know, so very kind of condensed way of learning, I guess. So that was something that I used a little bit along the way to help me. But Alessandra, this has been a good topic, good conversation, right?

Alessandra
11:07 - 11:23
Yeah, it was. And it made me think from talking to Shadows, she had invited me yesterday to a go brunch room with a colleague, Jackie. What was Jackie's name? I can't remember her surname.

Alessandra
11:23 - 11:34
I know she's in the UK and she was teaching us about learning and what silence tells us about the effectiveness of learning. What was her name? I think

Shadows Pub
11:34 - 11:37
it's McGinn. I never pay much attention to her last name.

Alessandra
11:37 - 12:06
But it was really good material. And the idea behind the learning is that when, and this is for yourself, or an awareness of how other people may be interacting in a learning situation, is if there is silence, Coming from a learner, whether it's you or the next person, you know, there's usually a reason for that. Could be that they're a deep thinker.

Alessandra
12:06 - 12:27
Could be they don't like to use all the air in the room. could be that they don't feel safe. So how I'll bring that back to our topic is how I learn is, first off, I've got to feel safe. Because when your nervous system is all activated and freaked out, you can't receive the information.

Alessandra
12:28 - 12:54
You cannot retrieve relevant information. Therefore, you can't take that and encode anything new. So whether it's for yourself, here's the tip of the day, whether it's for yourself or for someone that you're learning alongside, the sense of safety is so important to learning any darn thing. And it's most often overlooked.

Alessandra
12:54 - 12:59
So if I was learning how to tell time, What time is it, Greg?

Greg
13:00 - 13:16
You know, it's that time again, isn't it? You've wasted some perfectly good time listening to the Creative Work Hour podcast when you could have been doing something else. But what about you? If you were going to design your own school of creativity, what classes or experiences might you include?

Greg
13:16 - 13:24
We'd be interested to hear that. You can visit us at creativeworkhour.com. Come back again next week and we'll have another topic that we'll discuss.