A creative individual benefits from a strong foundation of childhood experiences from which they can draw inspiration as an adult. The first layer of the foundation is communal learning, which occurs at home, in cultural institutions, and eventually evolves into an ideal state of a peer group evaluation. The second layer is reading, which promotes imagination and introduces readers to distant teachers. These accomplished individuals, who are inaccessible because of their location, serve as models for creative living through their life stories and experiences. The third layer is collecting objects, skills, tools, and ideas, while organizing them into accessible information and resources. The final layer of the foundation is creating. The act of productivity helps to implement the collection into a tangible result, which stimulates an ever evolving process of lifelong learning.