Category: Creativity
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Creative Doing, at Sharpen Your Edge
I recently joined my friend Dr. Greg Wells at his podcast, Sharpen Your Edge. It usually airs at LinkedIn on Thursdays at noon et, you can catch this one at YouTube: One of the themes we talk about is how creativity is innate and every person is creative; indeed, many of us draw in school,…
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The four inner beings of a writer
Susan Sontag writes in her journal: The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsédé 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence. A great writer has all 4 but you can still be a good writer…
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Dan Crowe, on starting Port Magazine
I’m in the middle of developing a speech for Creative Doing right now, and the research process led me to revisit an interview I did with Dan Crowe (who most recently launched INQUE magazine) a few years ago. A few excerpts from Dan that I really loved: “My friends and I that launched [Port], we…
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Make a map
I recently came across Dishoom’s cookery book, a “highly subjective guide to Bombay with map.” The description very clearly explained a path to becoming a leading thinker or authority on something: make a map. The most obvious place is to start with an area you’re familiar with; where you live, where you work, your favorite…
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“As soon as they like you, make them unlike you…”
“A lot of people you see on the internet HAVE to be on the internet.” Donald Glover, Interview Magazine Recently, Rolling Loud festival announced that headliner artist Ye has dropped out of their festival. A lot of Ye fans are, rightfully, righteously indignant—this is the second time this year he has dropped out, last minute,…
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Lloyd Banks, on inspiration from magazines
Obviously 50 is my favorite member of G-Unit, but Banks comes in at a close second. At GQ, he talks about how he found departure points for his songs from print magazines: [At home] I had probably somewhere between 600 and 700 rap magazines. That was my process: I would flip through them while I…
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Instrumentalizing creativity
Creativity is best played as an infinite game; winning means you get to keep playing. This stands out in contrast to the convention of playing a game as a finite game; winning means you get to declare victory over your opponents, and stop playing. For creators, here are some elements to enable you to play…
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Creativity as an infinite game
Writing a book was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. The next-best decision was to write something I wanted to make. That may sound dead simple to you, but to me, it wasn’t. I experienced what my friend Hamza Khan calls “marketing brain”, which he describes as, “We think about the product, we…
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How to find a passed website with the Internet Archive
One special thing about the internet, for better or worse, is that few things ever really die. That’s largely not because websites don’t actually die—they do!—but because the Internet Archive does the really hard work of preserving them. I’ve written at length about digging up lost documents and how preserving them is like giving new…
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Aesop (the business), on lists
In their excellent hardcover book titled after their company, Aesop authors Jennifer Down and Dennis Paphitis write about the power of lists in an essay entitled “An Inventory of All Things”: At Aesop, there are lists on how we open and close a store or office each day, lists detailing laboratory processes, lists describing how…