Category: Creativity
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Holding back the good stuff
If you’re an artist, you will need to balance between delivering good work that matches your vision, and delivering the work at the level you’re capable of delivering. For example, sometimes there’s just not enough time, energy, and resources to do good work. Other times, timing isn’t right—the world isn’t ready to receive a certain…
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Virgil Abloh’s first website
For me, there are few things more exciting or entertaining than diving into a person’s early work. The more I like the work, the more early work I want to see. I recently came across the term, “nerdsniping,” from Paul Millerd. That sensation sums up what I experience when I’m researching the process of an…
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Participation trophies
In The Art of Possibility, Roz and Ben Zander write, “Enrolling is not about forcing, cajoling, tricking, bargaining, pressuring, or guilt-tripping someone into doing something your way. Enrollment is the art and practice of generating a spark of possibility for others to share.” A generous assumption of why participation trophies exist: it balances the all-consuming…
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Life is a team sport
When I interviewed Annie Duke, we discussed the writing process for her first book, Thinking In Bets. Duke had made writing a team sport, firstly by recruiting a friend with a Juris Doctor degree, who was also a writer, to be her editor—outside of her editor at her publisher. This friend helped serve as a…
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Do more, think less
Gapingvoid recently published a piece entitled, “Do more, think less.” It touches on one of the premises of Creative Doing, which is that new insights emerge from doing, not merely thinking. The phrase was drawn from a phrase I mentioned in an episode of Infinite Loops I did with Jim O’Shaughnessy. Jim introduced the phrase,…
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The 451 day project
I wrote a guest post at #The100DayProject, one of my favorite daily creative challenges. I just plugged the dates into a counter, I’ve published a post every day for 451 days! 🤯
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People make plans, and nature laughs
Resisting nature is not constructive; it’s always best to roll with it. You can plan around nature, too. It’s not going to stop laughing. You can choose to scream at it, worry yourself to death about it, try to make sense of it, laugh with it, or to sit beside it.
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Play to your strengths
It’s one thing to find a strategy, tactic, or best practice that worked for someone else. The internet is bursting with people sharing what works for them. It’s an entirely different thing to find the practice that works for you. You are the most important factor in how the things you do turn out. For…
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Compiling
Film editor Brian Kinnes recently compiled a 73-minute film of Frank Ocean’s infamous Coachella set, using fan-made footage. Brian Kinnes’s insight was to download all of the files as they were uploaded to YouTube; the footage has since been removed from the internet, and he uploaded it and received a cease and desist. He now…
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What are we surviving for?
There’s a common belief that medicine saves lives, and that art doesn’t. (Or, “Medicine actually saves lives though.”) This isn’t a constructive story. Nor is it a true story. This story was invented by people whose myopia for calculation blinded them to the facts. The benefits of salaries, scientific theory, and fear (disguised as practicality)…