One of the goals of this blog is to feature examples of creativity outside of advertising and share my thoughts about how they apply to my personal and professional world.

Often, when I get a chance to teach, I come back to a theme time and time again about creativity in general:

Unexpected things happen when you take a different route home.

When I was a college professor, I used to encourage my students to spend time and energy cultivating deliberately different ways of doing what they had come to think of as the routine. Easy things, like, mixing up your meals by eating spaghetti and meatballs for breakfast and waffles and bacon for dinner. Or, starting at Point A (in that case, Point A was the classroom in which we were sitting) and finding a completely different way to get to Point B (home, or to your job, or the Laundromat).

Why? At the most basic level, it’s because doing so forces a difference experience.  And that experience becomes part of who you are. And, in the end, personal experience is all we have to create from.

More varied personal experiences = a broader range of creative ideas to explore.

I believe it really is that simple. When you stop exploring, stop learning, stop experiencing the unexpected, it is then that your ability to create something worth exploring, worth learning about, capable of surprising, dies.

The video in this post is called “The Longest Way 1.0,” and it chronicles a year in the life of Christoph Rehage. I don’t know him personally. He’s just a guy whose story I ran across one day. He set out to travel on foot from China to Germany in the fall of 2007.

As you watch it, you’ll certainly notice that this example of “personal cinema” was achieved with very basic equipment. A point-and-shoot camera and a subject. But it all comes together in a compelling way that is pretty, well, cinematic. It tells a story. A story much more involving than the few minutes it takes to watch . See if your brain doesn’t fill in, between the gaps. You become involved in the narrative. No voiceover to explain. Not many words at all, really.

When you consider that this guy didn’t have a full-blown production entourage following him around, it’s more than kind of remarkable, isn’t it? This example also demonstrates another truth of creativity, in whatever form: commit to the “draft.” Stay with the process and have the discipline to keep returning to the craft of whatever it is that you do. Because the really inspired stuff comes out in the edit. Rehage obviously came to the camera every day, no matter what.

And in the process he demonstrated an extreme example of taking a different way home.