The Greatest Sustained Creative Project In Our Lifetime
The Webb Telescope has huge lessons for creators
I love scientists. I think they are the advanced long term creators. To do something scientifically you have to get it right, literally over and over again until your intellectual peers approve.
It is a different form of creativity.
The project took ten years, ten billion dollars, and endless hours to build and there were 344 failure points during the launch and deployment, each of which would have meant the telescope had failed. You may ask how a science, design, and engineering project like this qualifies as a creative project.
There is a movement in STEM education, science, technology, engineering, and math, to add an additional letter A to the acronym for art. STEAM is the nomenclature. I’d argue that Webb is the ultimate expression of that concept for several reasons.
The first is the magnitude of the vision required to conceive, sell, and fund this crazy endeavor, one that seems designed to fail. What creators can learn from this is persistence against all odds. It may seem like a stretch but a creative act like writing a novel or a symphony, for an individual, requires this level of persistence.
