Category: Creativity
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Quantity as an unblocking and organizing force
You don’t think to write, you write to think. If you’re stuck on coming up with a through-line for your work, a driving force that organizes it, just try writing 100 of them. You may stop at four, or ten, or whatever—when you realize you’ve come across the right one—and you’ll get unblocked. That happened…
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The joke funnel
I’m reading Springfield Confidential by Mathew Klickstein and Mike Reiss, and it’s gotten me laughing out loud more than any book from my recent memory. It’s also inspiring me to write jokes every other sentence at this blog, which itself was going to be a setup for a joke but just ended up making me…
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The power of the rubber duck
There’s a lot of power in talking through a problem, sometimes even if no one is around to hear it. You may be thinking out loud. This is known as rubber duck problem solving, because people often talk to rubber ducks. You make progress by talking to an inanimate object, or yourself; you either solve…
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6 points to consider before just shipping it
The current popular heuristic is, “Just ship it.” It leans towards a bias for action, giving people permission to ship something regardless of whether they think they are ready or not. Reid Hoffman’s popular saying goes, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” (I’ll never forget…
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Clear the wastewater
There’s a metaphor: creativity flows, like water through a pipe. Julian Shapiro calls this the Creativity faucet. He writes: Visualize your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile of piping is packed with wastewater. This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives. From the perspective of this metaphor, the wastewater…
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“This is probably dumb…”
I’ve now been writing at this blog daily-ish for 100 days now. It’s probably dumb. It certainly would look that way—stupid. Idiotic. Irrelevant. Corny. Cringe. So cringe. (I suspect the youth look at blogs the same way they look at Lin Manuel Miranda.) Blogging is dumb, in a sense. Not only because people just don’t…
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Early rejections
In his paper on Self-Efficacy, psychologist Albert Bandura writes: “In his delightful book, titled, Rejection, John White provides vivid testimony, that the striking characteristic of people who have achieved eminence in their fields is an inextinguishable sense of personal efficacy and a firm belief in the worth of what they are doing. This resilient self-belief…
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What I talk about when I talk about doing
I’m still thinking through a piece I read at Strange Loop Canon, in which Rohit Krishnan writes that thinkers do and doers think, but there’s still a macroscopic difference between the results that thinkers and doers actually produce: One place we see this is where there is a ton of conversation around the difference between…
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The story of Creative Doing, at Human Parts
Creative Doing just launched, which means I’m knee deep in promoting it. I plan to write more about the process—how I’m thinking about it, campaigns and always on, and what the goal really is. My fiancée made a great suggestion, which was to tell the story about why I wrote this new book about creativity. …
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You choose your game, then your game chooses you
This is part 3 in a series. You can start here, or with part 1 or part 2. When I was a kid a couple of friends and I decided to pretend to run a movie theater at the daycare we attended. We would roll up A4 papers diagonally to create popcorn containers, make signs…