Category: Creativity
-
How to find a passed website with the Internet Archive
One special thing about the internet, for better or worse, is that few things ever really die. That’s largely not because websites don’t actually die—they do!—but because the Internet Archive does the really hard work of preserving them. I’ve written at length about digging up lost documents and how preserving them is like giving new…
-
Aesop (the business), on lists
In their excellent hardcover book titled after their company, Aesop authors Jennifer Down and Dennis Paphitis write about the power of lists in an essay entitled “An Inventory of All Things”: At Aesop, there are lists on how we open and close a store or office each day, lists detailing laboratory processes, lists describing how…
-
Overidentification
It really isn’t always your responsibility. Timing won’t always work out right away. It won’t always feel like this. People don’t ignore or reject you, they’re living their own lives. Things will not always turn out as you prefer or expect. It doesn’t always get worse. Things are constantly changing. Just trying is enough. P.S.,…
-
A trick to consistency…
One of the challenges to getting anything related to creativity done is time and motivation. A solution here is to have an operation that you can do in mere seconds, so you can call your creative work complete for the day. I write in Creative Doing: The goal here is to simplify your creative operation,…
-
Creative hangovers
In Creative Doing, I write about the judge vs. the madman; in short, you and I have two sides to us. There’s the madman, who produces and revels in chaotic energy, and the judge, who protects us and acts as a filter. For many of us, the judge gets stronger throughout the years and the…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…