Category: Creativity
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Side projects open doors
When I was a student, I had no idea how I was going to get a job. In order to get a job, I needed to have experience; in order to get experience, I needed to have a job. Any internship worth getting also seemed to require working experience. Or so I thought. One of…
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Work isn’t meant to be escaped
Entrepreneur Curtis Jackson, also known as recording artist 50 Cent, writes in Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter: One of the most important realizations I came to early in my business career is that I’m running through an endless tunnel. What I mean by that is I came to understand that there’s no “happily ever after.” No…
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Katsushika Hokusai, drawing on the floor
Yesterday, I visited the Sumida Hokusai Museum. One thing that stood out to me was his rather modest studio; there was a replica in the museum. Hokusai drew on the ground! Creativity is not about the tools, it’s not about breaking through constraints; it’s about working with what you’ve got. I didn’t take a photo…
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It’s never too late
Ke Huy Quan, on restarting his acting career at 49: “For the longest time, I believed that I didn’t like acting anymore, until I started seeing my fellow Asian actors succeeding. I go: ‘Wow, time has changed. We are getting not just very stereotypical roles but meaningful roles, meaty roles.’ It wasn’t until then that…
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Printing lottery tickets
Here’s something that’s difficult to be honest about: Positive outcomes can’t be entirely designed or engineered. Sometimes they need exploration, discovery, and curiosity. These projects probably won’t have clear payoffs or immediate expected value; in fact, most of the time, they won’t. But with each project and insight, you’re also opening up new possible futures…
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While you can afford to be bad at it…
Practice it while the stakes are low. Practice it when you don’t need to. Practice it poorly, clumsily, in a messy way, until you learn how to practice it better. You’ll thank yourself.
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Unblocking creativity with motivation and incentives
When I write every day at my blog, I only write things I’d write for free, which means it’s for fun. When I tried to write every day at Medium, I was writing each article as an instrument to make money. Even though the end result might sound the same—I’m writing every day—the experience is…
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Making a movie
Let’s say you’re working a full-time job and, over the past year, have been inspired by something you learned about your family or your friends, or something that you experienced. You decide you want to make a movie. How would you approach it? Would you brave against the odds of the traditional film system, and…
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Intro to Creative Doing, at Ness Labs
Anne-Laure Le Cunff invited me to discuss Creative Doing with her community, Ness Labs. It was a really fun session: If you want to watch other sessions, check out: Creative Doing, on Infinite Loops Creative Doing, at Sharpen Your Edge Creative Doing, at Ideas Into Action Creative Doing, at Minds and Mics Creative Doing, at…
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Priority vs. energy
At his blog, Will Larson writes (emphasis added): Rigid adherence to any prioritization model, even one that’s conceptually correct like mine that prioritized the company and team first, will often lead to the right list of priorities but a team that’s got too little energy to make forward progress. It’s not only reasonable to violate…