I've only recently had the revelation that I'm not so much an educator as a creative - not so much a nerd as a creative - not so much of an agriculture person as a creative.
I had trouble with that because I don't have purple hair and an art degree. I grew up on a dryland wheat farm in the Texas panhandle - a jock, a nerd and decidedly quite Baptist.

I've also recently realized that I'm more of an idea, big picture person than I am a do-the-little thing person. I love thinking up research studies, but putting together literature reviews kills me. I'd rather brainstorm a thousand ideas and develop a few of them into viable solutions than to actually do the nitty gritty of executing them cradle to grave.

I'm also the kind of person who thrives on constantly foraging out new things, better ways to do, and more effective ways of doing things. My dissertation focused on change, and now I find myself working in a bureaucracy whose very existence depends on preserving itself through tried and true systems designed (it seems) to prevent anything new and untested from happening.

Where does that lead? What is the collision point of creativity, ideation, innovation and me? This is where I find myself today. The trouble with each of these parts of who I am is that they collide to generate more ideas and opportunities than can be executed. I frequently find myself saying, "This is the best thing ever - if I could only do THIS forever - life would be awesome." until I get to my next meeting, and then it's "This is the best thing ever - if I could only do THIS forever - life would be awesome."

So that brings me to December. We were hot in the middle of the creative phases of making our state's Master Gardener content available - which we start that pilot next week. I had end of year reports, conference submissions, project management issues, revise and resubmits to get done, and the rest of December life that happens so quickly before vacations. So the answer to - why aren't YOU presenting an Ignite talk is very simply - December.

I lead a team of folks who produce educational media. I've got editors, videographers, graphic designers and even an instructional designer. I do a lot of pushing pixels and instructional strategizing myself. We routinely put out several major hardback print pieces per year, and more than 100 smaller factsheets and other support pieces each year - including several new videos per month and at least one new online course each month.

One of the most difficult things about what my team does is that we take it very personally - we see ourselves as vocationally called to Extension - to support the needs of the people of our state. The difficulty is that we never see any of the impacts firsthand. We only see how many were sold or downloaded. For a group of people who put their hearts and souls into what they do, it's difficult to send out all that energy into the world and not know whether it had a return or not.

I'm glad to see the shift I see happening here at this conference to better storytelling. It suits my creative-idea-innovation personality, but better yet, it will eventually help my team and teams like us to have a way to connect with the impacts you are making in the world.