Creative Doing just launched, which means I’m knee deep in promoting it. I plan to write more about the process—how I’m thinking about it, campaigns and always on, and what the goal really is. My fiancée made a great suggestion, which was to tell the story about why I wrote this new book about creativity. […]
It’s one day until I ship something new. 3 things on my mind, in the hopes that each balances the other two out: 1. “For 2 frickin’ years, I thought it’s too early to release my app because it’s clunky, buggy, it’s missing features, blah, blah, blah. No one would ever use it, right? I […]
This is part 3 in a series. You can start here, or with part 1 or part 2. When I was a kid a couple of friends and I decided to pretend to run a movie theater at the daycare we attended. We would roll up A4 papers diagonally to create popcorn containers, make signs […]
“What are your choices, if someone puts a gun to your head?” This is a question posed by senior partner Harvey Spector to his protege Mike Ross, two protagonists in Suits. Ross is explaining how a rival executive had coerced him to do something against Spector’s interest. “You do what they say, or they shoot […]
There’s a lot of material out there about creativity for profit, and creativity for fun, but less about how to actually combine both. It seems as though everything that makes creativity profitable makes it less fun—and vice versa. So I want to write about this, because making money can be very fun as well. Part […]
In a delightful new essay, Derek Sivers makes the case that travel is best with young children. One of his points is the childlike sense of openness: Your child has no prejudices. This is my favorite part. I often go to places I’m biased against. Seeing them through my child’s unbiased perception, and interacting with […]
Oliver Burkeman writes in The Imperfectionist: “In the strongest sense of the word “need”, you don’t really need to become more focused, or realise your creative potential, or be more patient with your kids. You wouldn’t spontaneously combust, or cause others to die, or be judged the moral equal of Vladimir Putin, if you never […]
Dr. Heidi Grant writes in Reinforcements: There’s an inherent paradox in asking someone for their help: while help freely and enthusiastically given makes the helper feel good, researchers have found that the emotional benefits of providing help to others disappear when people feel controlled—when they are instructed to help, when they believe that they should […]
It’s so obvious to me that creativity and productivity have an incredibly important, and delicate, relationship. Too much creative energy without demands for productivity can cause creative blocks and fixation; the idea expands too far too fast, and it doesn’t end up coming to life in the physical world. Too little creative energy with high […]
Around halfway through 2019, I was really experiencing the peak of a creative block. I was working full-time at a Fortune 500, trying to run my editorial studio, and had barely enough time to write. Something had to give. Fortunately, my contract with the Fortune 500 would end in March 2020; conventionally, the Fortune 500 […]