Category: Creativity
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Learning Chinese again
When my parents decided to immigrate from Hong Kong to Canada, there was a system-level consequence: their future child was going to grow up speaking English, soaking up North American culture, and living a Canadian lifestyle. Saturday morning cartoons were part of this culture and lifestyle, but my parents had other ideas. Instead of letting…
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Learning fast vs. learning with your heart
When you’re a child, you have a superpower: you learn incredibly quickly. You soak knowledge up like a sponge. The only condition is that your heart needs to be in it. (This is known as enrollment.) This turns out to matter a lot, because you’re not always in control; you haven’t learned to trick yourself…
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Define your creative surfaces
One of the prompts in Creative Doing is Set Up Surfaces, which suggests that you create new places to store or publish your work. “Set up at least three different surfaces—one for storing your works in progress, one for sending to other people for feedback, and one for displaying your finished work,” I write. I…
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Release and consumption cycles
If your favorite TV show releases once a week, and you want to binge watch it, here’s a simple tactic: wait until the whole season is out. All it takes is restraint. We live in a time where there’s no shortage of distractions, so that can be useful here as well. Here’s how I apply…
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Early and late are relative
When you book a flight, you know you need to get to the airport by a certain time. If you need to get there four hours ahead of boarding time to feel comfortable, anything less than that buffer feels late. Even if you arrive two hours before boarding, you may feel like you should’ve been…
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Pokémon published Red and Green before making them perfect
It took Game Freak six years to develop the first Pokémon games, Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green. It took four years longer than the original release date. Still, there were glitches, bugs, and errors. The artwork in the game (e.g., sprites) needed to be updated to match the more refined artwork from the packaging and…
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Pokémon, collection, and connection
When Satoshi Tajiri first came up with the idea for Pokémon, he was fueled by two inspirations. The first was his childhood passion for collecting bugs. The second was the Nintendo Gameboy’s Link Cable. Satoshi imagined bugs crawling back and forth between the Link Cable, and children being able to collect, compete, and connect. Later…
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Change your hands, change your psychology
When you want to receive energy and be open to what’s around you, rotate your palms up to the sky. Hold them there for as long as you like. When you want to ground your energy and be calm, rotate your palms down to the ground. You can elaborate on this, and put your palms…