The joy of creation

In retrospect, now I consider myself a romantic ever-imaginative artist who chose to become a chip-designer for the thrill in it.

A chip is a combination of silicon with embedded logic that works on a series of guided electric pulses running from one point to another within it. It’s rigid, limited and yet time-consuming to design and build… making innovation all the more difficult.

However, the artist in me still imagines in unbounded space and dreams of improvements to the chip (among other things). Often they seem outright ridiculous or over-ambitious. Then I sit down with a pencil and one of my son’s old notebooks and focus to bring order into the chaos – design things no one may have attempted before (in the context of my area of technical expertise).

It’s not about a patent or the money or showing-off my capabilities, it’s about the satisfaction in making something new.

Think of Dali’s surreal paintings and Queen’s flamboyant music. I would exchange my life in return for the capacity to compose one “You Take My Breath Away” or paint one “The Persistence of Memory”. How much satisfaction would those creations have brought to the creators? Would material rewards matter? They just created because they savoured the joy of creation.

And remember Michelangelo striking Moses’ knee with a hammer close to completion and exclaiming “Now, speak!”?