Category: Creativity
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What annoys you?
A few months ago, I highlighted a book passage about finding what you want by starting with what you don’t want. You can similarly find good ideas by looking at the things that upset you, and then making something as a response. “I keep thinking that I shall have no more to say – and…
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Go all the way
When you read Charles Bukowski’s, “Roll the Dice,” which opens with the lines: if you’re going to try, go all theway.otherwise, don’t even start. You might be inclined to think that you need to push harder, to the point of desperation and burning the boats, as if what you’re doing is a matter of life…
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Keep the interest alive
One of the favorite passages I’d read recently comes from Anything You Want by Derek Sivers: “If you do this, you’ll encounter a lot of pushback and misunderstanding, but who cares? You can’t just live someone else’s expectation of a traditional business. You have to just do whatever you love the most, or you’ll lose…
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Hype vs. reality
One story is that you and I live in an age of hype, where in order to get the resources we need to make something we need to inflate it full of unrealistic expectations. In this frame, if you don’t hype your work, then people won’t pay attention and someone else—who is hyping their work—will…
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Remove imaginary barriers
One of my favorite prompts from Creative Doing is to remove imaginary barriers. It’s surprising to me how often I keep bumping up against barriers that I set up for myself—or that someone else set up that I unconsciously bought into. This comes up as a form of overthinking or procrastination. A list of imaginary…
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Mature confidence
Confidence is a character trait that you earn and develop in yourself. It’s pretty similar to going to the gym. Youthful confidence is boisterous and grandiose. It’s only a matter of time before it’s tested, and often this confidence is brittle. It’s not real yet. A mature confidence isn’t easily shaken. Bad things can happen—an…
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Consistency and breaks
There’s a best practice that equates consistency with success. For some people—the Type A personalities—the problem with taking this advice is when you inevitably break a schedule—a day, or a week, or a month—then you feel guilty, disappointed, and maybe even like you shouldn’t even have started in the first place. It becomes more difficult…
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Keep your promises to yourself
When you tell yourself that you’re going to do something, you need to get it done. A good promise usually fits into some patterns. Here are three, amongst may others, that work for me (that I’m writing in second person): A friend of mine once wrote, “How you do anything is how you do everything.”…
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Is time on your side?
Is your business position getting stronger by the day? Is your advantage growing? Do you feel more comfortable and relaxed? Are you spending more time doing the things you want to do? Are you getting tangibly closer and closer to your goal? Or are you paranoid about when the current sales contracts end? Are you…
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Avoid sitting with rejection
In 2007, Katy Milkman was in the middle of her doctoral degree at Harvard when she got bad news. Her manuscript, which she’d worked on for two years, was rejected by the journal she had submitted it to. She wasn’t sure what to do next and consulted her academic advisor, Max Bazerman. Bazerman assured her…