In an ideal world, the road from idea to reality is proven and predictable, with a distance made fathomable by visible benchmarks. But more frequently - especially in pursuit of less linear concepts like art, drastic innovation, or even paradigm shifts - time is mutable and you can't project when completion will come.

Read more at The 99%

Last week I had a blast presenting at the 2012 Kickoff event for SheSays Boulder, the Colorado chapter of a global creative network for women (one that boasts some really awesome collaborators/initiatives, you should know about them). 

We took a retrospective look at internet trends, following each year's emerging technology and subsequent impact on digital communication, branding and even careers. The career part is what wound up cracking me up a bit - because even though it's painfully obvious now, I don't think I've ever consciously acknowledged that my own (short) career is nothing but a succession of jobs that didn't even exist the year before I took them. That either makes me digitally savvy or a miserable trend whore. Meh.

Anyway, because this was a bit of a mentoring event, I paired each year o' the internet with a few important lessons learned during each of them - times when I was working from the back of a classroom, in a coffeeshop, in an agency, in a startup, and now in a startup I'm a partner in. It's crazy how much I've been exposed to, and I'm so grateful for the people that have welcomed me into the places where I learned this stuff. These lessons aren't all that awesome out of context, but a few attendees asked me to post this for future reference. So here you go, gals - and thanks again for having me!

No matter where you live, if you live in the internet you live everywhere.

You are responsible for your own education. And reverse education.

Creativity feels f*cking awesome.

Trust the feeling that feels like exclamation points.

Willpower is power, and vice versa.

Culture comes from the bottom up.

Writing in your pajamas is lovely.

Impeccable communication, while highly rated, is still underrated. Ditto for emotional intelligence.

Everyone has an opinion. You might as well embrace yours.

Internet literacy is actually not common. At all. Yet.

Surround yourself with people you want to be like.

Quarter life crisis are real. And you should welcome them.

Change is really hard.

Data is King, but the King’s too fat to trailblaze.

Sour is scary.

You can always re-find what you were.

Pick your partners well.

Aspire to be balanced.

Ask for help (and find the best help you can find).

I love it when people drop quotes from kids movies in everyday conversation. That person is never me - though I'd kill for that repertoire - but to feel the words with the weight of a grownup's respect for them is such an awesome example of evolving perception and comprehesion. Like J.M. Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan. Total weirdo. But God he was good with words.

...really help put things into perspective. Praying someone makes an infographic around this. 

A few days ago, someone I very much respect said something that very much made me want to break his neck. 

I'll save you the conversation's peripheries, but in effect we were discussing normalcy - specifically, his opinion of a situation that he found to be very normal. This wasn't an interpersonal situation, but a work situation, interpreted according to his standards in regards to performance and quality. It was also a work situation that we shared.

It was also a situation that I saw as a hot, hot mess, and I was on fire with frustration from his blockheaded unwillingness to confront, discuss and fix it.

Traditionally, me and this fellow had seen very eye to eye, but a gradual parting of our individual perceptions had been digging a pretty foretelling gulch between us. I'd attributed the parting to outside factors - stress, time constraints, etc - but still wore the lazy communication hangover of one of those relationships where you read each other's minds and finish each other's sentences. 

This conversation delivered a seriously needed sucker punch to that hangover (super messed up, those hangover sucker punches) because in the midst of wondering how best to conduct a clean murder in a coffee shop full of hippies, my heart broke a little. I'd suddenly realized just how seriously our shifting perceptions of normal - and our failure to communicate them - had seriously impacted our ability to work as a team. He saw market ready, I saw mockup.

This isn't to say that my opinion about what we should have achieved was right, or that his comfort with our performance was slovenly. My tiff with Mr. Disagreable was beyond the point where one of us was definitevely right. It was purely a matter of standards, of our own personal definition of normalcy.

Sharing a similar set of norms is one of the best efficiency tools we've got. It cuts out communication time, guards against miscommunication and acts as a natural corral for aligning goals and expectations. When norms match up, it's smooth sailing. When norms differ, there isn't a sail, just a bunch of people paddling off stroke. If you catch my drift, it's the difference between Apple and Microsoft.

But the tricky thing about normal is that there's no such thing. There's a level where stuff is undoubtedly horrific, and a level where stuff is undoubtedly amazing, and all the stuff in the middle is sort of - open to interpretation. What are the industry standards? What are the standards of the audience? What standards are specific to your individual business and employees? Are you German?

Settling on an unchanging definition for normal is impossible, but entertaining the same interpretation of it is imperative to a company's ability to fully realize a common goal. Standards and expectations make up the invisible bar for performance that we are accountable to, and when they differ within the same walls - well, no wonder we get frustrated. 

Here's some stuff I learned from this near bloodbath:

• Good teams aren't so much the matching of minds as the matching (and guarding) of normals. 
• Efficiency increases when perceptions of normal are the same, and decreases when they differ.
• Opportunities for miscommunication increase when perceptions of normal are different.
• The feeling of frustration is one of the best clues that you might be dealing with normalcy differences.
• To keep your team on track, consistently take the temperature for their standard of normal, for everything from broad company vision to per-project success metrics. Then make sure it's widely communicated.

• This stuff is absolutely as applicable to interpersonal relationships as it is to business ones.

Sometimes I miss the days when I got to loll around in my undies, get jacked on huge pots of coffee and write about stuff no one really knew about yet. Especially times like right this effing second, when I feel pretty washed up for having just found Solange Azagury-Partridge - some impossibly individualistic jewelry designer who's clearly been badassing around long enough to have opened a flagship store in New York City. And god is it the blessed antitheses to Tiffany's. And holy god is it possible that this jewelry designer is also a former interior designer that hand crafted the preposterously and unreasonably amazing space below. Shivvver.

Watch these babes try to hold back their enthusiasm and pronounce the word 'Tajazzle' at the same time.

Happy V-Day, lovers.

Research shows that the creativity of America's children, specifically those between the ages of 5 and 12, is declining. Just to clarify: this doesn't mean that our kiddos are showing reduced skillz with crayonz, it means their ability to solve problems without pre-defined answers is fading out.

It would be nice to correlate this decline in creativity with a decline in overall intelligence, indicating some nasty flaw in the education system. However, the same kids with decreasing creativity scores are delivering increasing IQ scores - which is considered by many as a fair indicator of schools' health.

Meanwhile, creativity has become the #1 sought after trait in today's executives (that's all executives, not just those in advertising), and our future depends on the ability of tomorrow's leaders to think in ways we've yet to fathom. Is our "fill in the blank" style of education destroying our kids' ability to think outside the - blank?

The debates over education are dirty, political and rightfully complex, but at the end of the day, teachers can seem to find agreement in the following point of angst: today's educational system isn't making it easy to teach creatively, let alone teach creativity.

What the system does seem to be doing (and what those declining creativity scores seem to confirm) is perpetuating the idea that for every problem, there is an answer, and if you don't have that one answer memorized, you won't just be wrong - your future might be at stake.

It smells a lot like fear-based education. And nothing kills creativity like fear.

Teachers are fearful that their kids won't make the cut if they don't fill in the right bubbles. Parents are fearful that their kids' futures will be sabotaged if they don't measure up to the given "standard." Kids, like grownups, are just fearful of failure, and when creativity goes unrewarded - or even punished - that's what it becomes associated with.

Creativity is about taking risks, tenaciously pursuing something undefined, and feeling gratitude for the lessons (ie, the failures) we learn along the path to our answer. Some might even define creativity as the opposite of fear; a sort of open-minded courage to attack real problems without the safety net of pre-defined conclusions. In other words, creativity doesn't mesh well with the rules inherent to today's education system.

There's an interesting challenge flying around the advertising world this week that hopes to directly address this problem. Dubbed No Right Brain Left Behind, the challenge is a sort of open source, pro-bono problem busting event, which you can learn more about here (and if you'd like to get involved, the group I'm part of is still accepting participants - hurry over this way for more info).

The ideas born from this challenge will be interesting to review, but the implementation of those ideas is what's really gonna keep the creative zombies at bay.

This article was written for The Denver Egotist.