Art helped me breathe.
I was born after my mother had six miscarriages.
She often told me I was here for a reason.
I did not know what that reason was. But the question stayed with me.
I was homeschooled for much of my childhood. Our home was part classroom, art studio, science lab, and nature.
I did experiments in our basement, explored the forest, tried instruments, followed my curiosity, and stayed up late drawing.
Then my father became very sick when I was ten.
My world flipped on its head.
I began having nightmares I couldn't explain. Drawing helped me put what I felt onto paper.
When I made something, I could breathe again.
Art gave my feelings somewhere to go.
Fear became an image.
Confusion took shape.
Pain became something I could hold.
Before creativity became my life's work, it helped me survive what I didn't have the words for: depression.
I almost died with work still inside me.
At thirteen, an art competition took me to Italy, where I studied the work of master artists.
By eighteen, I had won more than fifty art contests.
But I wanted to know more than how to make beautiful things.
I wanted to know what making art did to the person making it.
Why could a painting make someone feel less alone?
Why did some ideas stay with us for years?
Why did some people stay curious while others stopped creating over time?
Then, one day in college, blood clots filled both of my lungs.
I couldn't move.
I went to the hospital and almost died.
Before that, death was only an idea to me.
Then it became real. Close. Strong enough to change every choice that came after it.
All I could think about were the ideas I kept putting off.
I realized I could die with my best work still inside me.
I began to see creativity in a new way.
Everywhere I looked I noticed ideas lying dormant in other people.
Ignoring the looming fact that time was running out.
Making something became a way to say:
I was here. I noticed. I felt something. I made it real. I left a mark on the world.
That belief became my calling.
I built Sparketh for creative kids.
At twenty-one, after almost dying, I left college and started Sparketh.
Sparketh is an online art school for kids.
The idea was simple: the world suppresses kids' creativity. It starts in schools. So let's bring art education into the home.
A place where kids could follow what interested them, build skills, and see themselves as creators.
Sparketh has taught more than 60,000 young people in over 100 countries.
Building it taught me something.
People don't stop creating because they are not creative.
It fades when the world teaches us not to embrace it.
People stop creating when they fear being bad.
When comparison kills curiosity.
When doing more matters more than paying attention.
When the world asks for answers before they have had time to explore.
I eventually noticed that children were not the only ones hurt by these forces.
It happens to adults too.
The creativity is still there.
We just lose touch with it.
I wrote Create or Die for people who feel the need to create.
That observation led me into years of study.
I studied artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, inventors, founders, and thinkers.
I wanted to know what helped them keep creating.
Their curiosity.
Their taste.
Their courage.
Their judgment.
Their power to stay close to an idea before anyone else could see its worth.
I became obsessed.
That work became my book, Create or Die: 48 Keys of Creativity.
The title is meant to hit hard.
I believe something in us gets quieter every time we ignore our urge to create.
The story we never write.
The question we never follow.
The strange idea we push away.
The part of us we keep putting off until life gets less busy.
Create or Die is about what keeps that part of us alive.
I built World of Creatives for what came next.
Sparketh began with creative kids.
Create or Die explored the creative person.
World of Creatives asks a bigger question:
What could happen if everyone created what only they could create?
It began as a YouTube channel about creativity.
Then it grew into something bigger.
Today, World of Creatives is the home for my writing, videos, community, and other work.
I write about creativity, art, life, fear, purpose, and what helps us keep making.
I make videos about the parts of creating we feel but don't always know how to name.
I study creators from many fields searching for deeper patterns in their work.
I built a private community where creators can make work, meet people, talk deeply, and grow together.
I am also building guided creative Journeys that help people practice creativity instead of only reading about it.
Behind all of it is a larger mission called the Global Renaissance.
It is our name for a more creative, human, connected future.
World of Creatives brings it all under one mission:
Help people make what only they can make.
Help more people do it.
And shape the world together.
The questions I am asking now.
Today, my work moves between making, writing, studying, teaching, and building.
I keep coming back to questions like:
How does AI make being human more important?
How do we protect beauty when machines can make almost anything?
How do we hear our own voice through all the noise online?
What helps a new idea grow?
How do we build tools that deepen attention instead of breaking it apart?
How do we keep creativity alive in systems that push us to become average?
What would the world become if more people made the things only they could make?
I do not have all the answers.
World of Creatives is where I explore the questions.
Everything I build starts with the same feeling I had as a kid looking at a blank page:
Something could exist here that does not exist yet.
Let’s see if we can bring something new into the world.
Together.
World of