Category: Creativity
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“The road is made by walking”
Walker, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more. Walker, there is no road, the road is made by walking. Walking you make the road, and turning to look behind you see the path you never again will step upon. Walker, there is no road, only foam trails on the sea. Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, translated by Willis Barnstone
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The right season
A fruit is nothing picked out of season. Even a brute’s praise won’t stand to reason. Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, translated by Willis Barnstone
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Put the words on the page
When Lauren Martin was writing her book, and dealing with the anxiety of it, she sought out advice from other writers (via Jimmy Chim). She learned: The consensus was obvious: Stay present. Stay with what’s in front of you. Don’t get ahead of yourself, don’t worry about the middle and the ending, just stick with…
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A place is a tool
Whenever you feel like what you’re doing is really difficult, try changing where you do it. I wrote about this in-depth at Forge. I also recently heard Paul Ford and Rich Ziade describe the office as a tool, which reminded me of a story from my student days, about how the library was a tool…
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It’s still hard
A few weeks ago, a friend—a fellow author who also blogs every day—said something to the effect of, “I can’t believe you blog every day while you work a full-time job.” I shrugged it off. My memory of the experience mostly involves having a lot of fun, the writing feeling easy, and a deep sense…
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Serve tomorrow’s lucky 10,000
Every day, many people will learn something for the first time that you had taken for granted for years. For some of these people, the thing they learned could change their life. (Here’s a fun thread illustrating this possibility.) Randall Munroe makes this point with this comic at xkcd: There are some important implications here:
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The curse of knowledge
“The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.” — Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century Via Asimov Press
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Can’t vs. didn’t
“People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.” — Florence Foster Jenkins PS Mag (via Anthony Iannarino) See Tommy Wiseau in Creative Doing. Go down the Florence Foster Jenkins rabbit hole here:
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Just one tooth
There’s a classic idea that the key to flossing regularly is to floss just one tooth. The key his this: it’s much easier to show up every day if you can reduce the task down to something so small and simple that it requires next to no effort. In Creative Doing, I share a prompt,…
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To succeed in the age of A.I., build your capacity for longcuts
A couple of years ago, my friend Nik Göke wrote a really nice piece at his blog, “Sometimes, the Work Is Easier Than the Workaround.” In the intro, he writes about trying to find a fast, technical, shortcut to scrape a bunch of text online: The tool was pretty technical, so it took a while…