Category: Creativity
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Thank you, Faiz
My friend Faiz Ahmed passed away yesterday. Thanks for being a good friend. Thanks for being you. Thanks for encouraging me with my writing, including reading the very rough first draft of Creative Doing. Thanks for writing your blog. Thanks for reading and sharing your ideas. Thanks for asking thoughtful questions and listening. Thanks for…
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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…