Category: Creativity
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The vessel heuristic
What if, when you made art, you weren’t expressing yourself? What if you were a vessel for something greater to express themselves through? “The human mind is literally an antenna,” Pharrell says. “It picks up waves and transmissions from the ultimate source, from the ether.” “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before…
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Invest in your stories
My friend Peter started posting at LinkedIn a couple of years ago. He noticed that while people who followed him appreciated his advice, what they remembered most were his stories—about how he met his co-founder and started an agency, how they spun out new companies, and his move from Brooklyn to Hudson Valley. It’s with…
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Fast & Furious
The Fast & Furious franchise was inspired by an article on street racing culture by Kenneth Li. The first three movies in this Fast & Furious franchise—Fast & Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift—maintained its signature by staying true to this throughline, rotating its cast members, and focusing…
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Confidence vs. trusting the process
“This might not work,” Seth Godin writes in his blog post, “Out on a limb.” (It’s one of my favorites, alongside “Talker’s Block.” ) It’s fascinating to see this idea make it into a key part of his book The Practice, which I recently picked up and find myself liking a lot. If you pick…
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Serious writing
In Impro, Keith Johnstone describes how his teachers taught him to write, “They wanted me to reject and discriminate, believing that the best artist was the one who made the most elegant choices. They analysed poems to show how difficult ‘real’ writing was, and they taught that I should always know where the writing was…
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A few seconds of space
George Mumford works with professional athletes—including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal—on their mindfulness. When a journalist from ABC News interviewed him, one of the outstanding things he said was, “…You can slow time down when you create space between stimulus and response—[then] three seconds is an eternity.” Practicing creating this space is incredibly valuable.…
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A genuine reaction
When you do good work, you need to believe in the work. Put it out there, find a place to publish and promote it (definitely more than once!), and let the people respond. You don’t need to ask them for a five star review, or for applause, or anything like that. If the work is…
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100% organic
Plants don’t necessarily need gardeners to grow; for many millennia, they have grown on their own. Even if a person wanted to, they don’t control how or when a plant grows—they can only influence the odds of survival by giving it good care. Organic growth just happens. You can do a lot of things to…