When I was a child, I would often envision an incredibly rich, detailed image (usually something related to monsters or robots or superheroes), but I would be incapable of translating that envisioning to graphite and paper.

That inability to draw things the way I thought they should look was frustrating, and it motivated me to redouble my burgeoning doodling efforts, to take all sorts of advanced placement art classes, and to eventually major in art with a focus on drawing (before eventually pivoting to design and illustration).

I think of this ability—the capacity to dream something up and to then accurately translate that dream into an output other people can (and will want to) engage with—as creative agency. It’s a capacity that some people are born with, but which all of us initially lack with most mediums, be it drawing, dancing, writing, or performance art.

What’s interesting about this concept is that the more creatively agentic we become with a given medium, the more expansive our imaginations become. As I practiced and learned and eventually became the “kid who draws good” at school, my imaginative ambitions expanded along with my capacity to make things. I wasn’t just drawing better ninjas, I was coming up with other, more complex things to draw.

The same tends to be true of any creative practice we might attempt. And by expanding the depth of our creative agencies and the range of agencies we can claim (different mediums and mechanisms), we slowly but surely become more capable of communicating and translating to more and a wider variety of people, even as the things we communicate and translate grow in scope and ambition.

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