Category: Creativity
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Your intentions need baking and cleaning
When you intend to do something, are you set up to follow through? If you find that it’s more difficult than you think, I’d like to suggest a metaphor and two techniques: Baking new intentions: Start your workday with a paper index card which has a list of a few tasks, preferably with the most…
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This, too, can be meditation
The more menial a task is, the easier it is to make it a form of meditation. Activities like walking to an errand, washing dishes, and cooking come to mind. Whenever I feel myself twisting up into a frazzle, “This, too, can be meditation,” comes to mind. The statement helps me loosen up. It creates…
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Practicing in public
There’s a piano inside a bookstore. It’s available for anyone to play, including you. If you do that, you won’t need to buy a piano, but the trade is that everyone hears you play, practice, or perform. They might like it, they might not. They may be waiting their turn. You’ll need to develop a…
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Trust yourself
It’s simple, pithy, and cliche. It’s also something worth reminding yourself of more often than you think. There are two films that convey this message really well, spoiler alerts for both: In Rental Family, the protagonist is an actor whose job is pretending to be people’s family members. For example, a mom hires him to…
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Sketch, don’t paint
As I was developing my upcoming speech for CreativeMornings, I received some advice: you’re trying to paint, when all the audience needs is a sketch. There won’t always be a need for you to go through all the details in such high fidelity. Meanwhile, you can also choose from a variety of ways to communicate,…
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10 years of stories
Whether it’s a client-initiated project or a self-initiated one, my projects all have one thing in common: I’m telling a story. Spending energy in this process—finding a story, developing a thesis, pitching it, giving it shape, infusing it with experience and expertise, writing it, editing it, publishing it, promoting it—effectively creating assets that connect the…