There’s something adults can learn from kids to allow us to explore and create more freely. These three behaviors are worth taking note of, and might pay dividends personally and professionally.

Using tested tools and frameworks takes the guesswork out of the “how” and provides a recipe to follow. But they aren’t enough. You can have the best hammer and nails but if you are too afraid to swing the hammer and make the birdhouse because it might be ugly, you’ll just have a pile of tools and no place for birds to live. When we create, we bring something new into the world. Fear arises when we think about doing anything new. New is unknown. New is novel. New is scary. Our brains want us to stay in the safe zone.

To stay relevant in today’s rapidly changing marketplace you must change. ‘Adapt or die’ in evolutionary terms. If you stay the same or move too slow, you put your business at risk of not being here in the future.

Language is a tool people use every day but words can fail us. Drawing feels uncomfortable and intimidating to many of us. But even the worst (and I’d argue that there is no bad drawing — the only bad drawings are the ones that aren’t drawn.) Drawing communicates volumes compared to a sentence.

Time spent in nature gives me confidence that patterns will emerge from even the toughest problems — and beautiful things will grow from the mud.