Last month, Facebook was filled with happy pictures of parents dropping
their children off at college and setting up cute dorm rooms,
all of which is a wonderfully exciting time. Congratulations to you all!
You’ve worked many years to get your children to this point.

Some freshmen are filled with dreams and aspirations, while others are excited to be at college, but have no idea what they want to do career-wise, and that’s alright. While I had a great career in marketing, I didn’t find what I really wanted to do until I was 38 years old, but my years spent at college helped me get there. A college education expands far beyond academics. In fact, most graduates come out of college knowing more about how to persevere, how to get along with people, how to say no to a party in order to make it to graduation, and how to negotiate (or plead) with professors than understanding the ins and outs of business law or calculating odds in statistics.

“I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”
—Diane Ackerman

I want to encourage you to take a moment and rise above yourself in your thoughts. Take an aerial view of your life. Look at it as though you are viewing it from an airplane window. From 5,000 feet it looks pretty neat and orderly, doesn’t it, like those plots of land and color that are perfectly squared off when viewing them from above?

Have you ever wondered exactly how your life got from there to here? Here where you are today in your relationships, your career, your satisfaction, your health, your happiness, your attitude? As the creator and owner of Pink, I am often asked how I started it, or what made me do it. My answer is the same every time: When I step back and take an aerial view of my life, the path is perfectly clear, and that path lead me straight to Pink.

Every time I go into the grocery store I spend far more time than planned. When I walk out, I feel as though I’ve been in a time warp. The other night, I spent almost 15 minutes just in front of the egg section trying to decide which eggs to buy. In the past, I would casually stroll up to the eggs (there wasn’t really a “section”), open the lid to make sure none were cracked or leaking, put them in my cart and stroll on. I mean, eggs are eggs, right? Not anymore.

“Clean out a corner of your mind,
and creativity will instantly fill it.”
—Dee Hock

Let’s give creativity some airtime. The theme of this month’s issue is “Creative Minds” and features mega, talented, creative women and other ways to perk up your life via creativity. However, I can’t tell you how many times I have heard people exclaim: “I don’t have a creative bone in my body.”

Please allow me to set the record straight: Almost everyone has a creative bone in their body, including you! If you cook, clean, sing (even if it’s only in the shower), parent, garden, read, smoke, you have creativity. Yes, I meant to say smoke; how do you think smoke rings came about? Someone got very fancy and creative with the toxins leaving their body.

For the most part, I gave up judging people about the same time I gave up perfectionism. When I finally got old enough—actually wise enough—to realize I’m not perfect, nor do I need to be; I also relinquished that expectation of others. With the freedom of being released from the shackles of trying to do right, be right, look right and act right all the time, I learned judging others, just like judging yourself, is usually premature and always unloving. In addition, it is binding to persons on both sides of the bench.