The other day, in a conversation, I was comparing how we spend our time to how we invest our money.

We invest some of our money in consuming things we like, we invest some in securing our future opportunities, we invest some to let it earn some more, we invest some in giving it away to charities, etc.

Likewise, we invest our time in precisely the same areas. However, the proportions might be different.

If you think hard enough you can say this about anything that we do - the people we hang out with, the conversations we have, the meetings we have, etc.

If you abstract anything by a good enough amount, then you will start to notice similarities with practically anything else (also abstracted out enough).

In fact, the human mind even begins to invent patterns where they don't exist. There is a famous example from a TEDTalk, where a random sound is first played, which nobody in the audience can make any sense of. After that, the speaker says a sentence and then plays the random sounds again. Now, the random sounds start to sound very similar to the sentence he just spoke before that.

We are all inherently creative. We just need to tap into it.

(Hat-tip to James Altucher, for inspiring this thought process)