BUILD IT! - 2 Life Lessons I Learned about Creativity

Ya know, sometimes ya just gotta build it if it doesn't exist.

It's natural that we all have different ways of expressing our ideas. Some people like freewriting essays, poetry, or short bulletpoint lists. Some people like to play piano, pressing different notes until they find the right melody. Some people like to dance, and feel the vibes expressed through all the different movements.

Being creative, i learned, is not limited to the arts alone!
We can be creative in: 

• how we solve problems, 

• how we communicate,

•  how we style our hair, 

  …and our fashionable fits!

•  even in how we make food for our loved ones.

I believe our creativity is best expressed as building something from nothing!

to Create…
to Make…
to Build..

…means to bring something to life that didn’t exist before.

Build it when it hasn’t been build before.

I think some of the best inventions were made out a sheer NEED for a task to be completed. When something wasn’t there before, we created it in the space of nothing. As it is natural for us humans to be creative, we can spark our ideas into reality purely from our intention to do so!

all we need is an idea,
and some passion!

What are some ways that you like to find solutions to problems?
How do you express your ideas, thoughts or emotions?
Share in the comments!

STORYTIME! ^_^

So in preparation for this idea, this very blog you are reading right now… i thought to gather all my notes from over the years related to my experiences discovering my own creative process.

I knew i could get transcripts from my podcasts and from my videos on youtube…. but what about all the voice memos i made? So many times, instead of writing or typing, i've found it easier to just talk it out in a recorded audio message. 

ahh.. soo how do i get transcripts of all the voice messages i made? 

• Apple hadn't included the feature of transcribing voice memos yet.

• It costs quite a bit of money and time to hire someone to transcribe audio over a certain amount.

• I'd also have to upload my audio files to the internet, and that can create a risk issue of privacy.

I searched the web for a service that was free… but most required payment for transcribing audio. Plus, they all had limits on how many files you could upload, or how many minutes they could transcribe per month. 😳 

i am looking for a tool that:

• transcribes audio quickly,

• offline, no internet needed,

• cost-effective, cheap, or FREE!

and i could not find any tools that did all three listed above.

I NEED TO BUILD IT MYSELF! 🧰 🔧

So I started looking up all the different web apps to see what’s out there, how they work, what AI models were being used today. I spent several hours and days of research just learning about open source AI speech-to-text tools. I found out about Wav2Vec, ASR, Vosk, and something that starts with ‘K’ and librispeech, and i learned so much more than I knew what to do with… but even days later I still couldn’t figure out what was missing, and I still had no tool that did what I needed it to do: transcribe for free, and locally offline on my own computer.

After some more researching l finally found something on HuggingFace about their speech-to-text whisper transformer tools and I felt so close to figuring out how it all works… that’s when i finally took the plunge to ask a GPT chatbot to write some python code for me. 

It was so fast in generating the code!
Yes, it was broken code on the first try, of course! 😂

I felt myself getting the engineering-itch to keep iterating on the code until i got exactly what i needed for the task!

I went back to researching and kept learning more and more about different python libraries…

I would make a change,
test it out,
look up the error messages,
and go back to re-writing the code.

With each iteration i was figuring out additional features to add so that the user experience was better than before. Breaking the code during iteration and then learning how to fix it gave me some new creative problem-solving skills so that i could make the script better and more useful!

And now finally I am uploading it to github for anyone to use for free! 

*Because that was the whole reason why i learned how to build it myself,
because it didn’t exist
and i needed this tool
to continue working on my project. 

The 2 Life Lessons about Creativity i Learned from this experience are:

Build it! 💻 🔧

and…

Keep Learning! 💡📚

HOT TIP:

There’s nothing holding us back from Building the things we need and to Keep Learning anything and everything we need to get the job done.

ya just gotta have an idea, and a curiosity-filled-passion to take a step closer to bringing it to life!

go for whatever you are passionate about!

Here is the github link to the python script to bulk transcribe audio files:

https://github.com/ripscreates/bulktranscribe
I made a video demo’ing it here:

Everything you need to know about how to use the script is in the readme guide. If you want, I can make a video walking through using the script for anyone that is interested. Let me know in the comments.

Now I’m learning all about docker, yaml and kubernetes so i can bundle everything together so there’s only 1 download to worry about. 

If you’re feeling adventurous and comfortable with the command line interface (CLI) you can just follow the Readme guide to make sure you have all the prerequisites to run the script as it is written. 

i hope this helps!

Please do share with me if it works, and if it doesn’t work, lemme know too! 

I’m always learning new things and feedback from you on the script will be helpful in making it better. Fork it if you wanna update it for other models and whatever other ideas or features you wanna add or change.

if you are interested in hearing more about how people from all different backgrounds build, learn, and find their way through their creative process, take a listen to this podcast “From Process to Progress” https://linktr.ee/fromprocesstoprogress

Check out the quick soundbites from each episode, 15sec-30sec each, to hear what it's like to discover that ah-ha moment of clarity when being creative.