Category: Creativity
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Something to respond to
Several years ago, I suggested that responding was a powerful way to make more creative work. Advice columns and call-in radio shows are relatively timeless examples of this dynamic. You can also flip this advice and apply it to someone else: if you want to hear or understand somebody’s thoughts, give them something to respond…
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“What if I’m no good?”
Let’s say you want to do something creative. You’re not sure about how good you really are, or how much money you’ll make, or whether or not you’ll “go somewhere” with it. Would you do it anyway? The answer needs to be a resounding yes. That’s the level of drive and sacrifice that it takes…
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Preparation is not an excuse for procrastination
This post will be most useful for people who experience a tendency to overthink. In The Score Takes Care of Itself, Bill Walsh writes that luck would decide 20% of the final score of the average football game. While that 20% was out of his control, he could still prepare and plan for the other…
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A second opinion, before giving up
A schoolteacher writes the first three pages of a short story on a typewriter. When he’s done, he’s disgusted with it. It was getting too long, he didn’t know how to market it, he didn’t like the character, he couldn’t relate to the story, the list goes on… He throws it out. His wife finds…
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Professional karaoke
While karaoke is incredibly fun, you won’t have much luck finding a job as a professional karaoke singer. You may have better luck selling your work as a cover artist or cover band, but even that’s different from karaoke. You need to practice. Learn a catalog of songs well. Find gigs and take requests from…
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Martin Scorsese’s longcut
Martin Scorsese recently donated 50 storage boxes of tapes to the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library. Long before the internet and streaming, Martin hired a full-time video archivist in his New York office to record films and television programs from multiple VCRs and monitors, label the video tapes, and catalog them using a card…
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“Intellectual concentration as entertainment”
Over a decade ago, Nassim Taleb wrote at Facebook: LEARNING TO DO NOTHING (Idleness as a BS detector/cleaner) – At the start of this year I resolved to do “nothing except if it felt like a hobby” i.e., “satisfy interests while providing entertainment value with zero pressure, no schedule and no feeling of duty”. The…
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Delusions and evolutionary fitness
Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler write in Useful Delusions: In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have shown that the human brain is designed to make a number of errors in perception and judgment. These “bugs”—distortions, shortcuts and other cognitive cross-wiring—produce slanted pictures of reality. They exist for a reason: Evolution found that, on average, the…
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Entrepreneurship isn’t a job title, it’s a mindset
Some words from Satish Kanwar came to mind today, which is a lesson he learned after selling his business: The truth is, it took me longer than I care to admit to realize that I had been thinking about my identity the completely wrong way. Being an entrepreneur wasn’t attached to this business. It was…
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Preparation enables presence
Whether you’re playing in a competitive sport, appearing as a speaker, or attending an important meeting, showing up prepared will set you up to be more present.