Category: Creativity
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You’ll Never Have Enough Time. Start Your Creative Work Today
In Make Your Art No Matter What, Beth Pickens writes, “The most frequent issue with time for artists is the belief they don’t have enough time for their art practice or as much time as they would like to devote to it.” Artists with all sorts of different schedules, habits, commitments, family expectations, all report…
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Work on the Weekends Only If You’re Learning Something Useful
You should only work on the weekends if you’re learning something that supports your future or puts you on a path to enjoying your work.
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How to Stop Overcommitting at Work: A Summary of Unplanned Work in The Phoenix Project
The Phoenix Project is a fictional story covering how an IT team leads its company, slogging through technological and organizational transformation. It’s an exciting way to learn more about software operations. It’s a business fable, not dissimilar from The Goal, The Wealthy Barber, or The Grumpy Accountant. I want to summarize one of the key…
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How to Break a Creative Block in 24 Hours
Creative blocks are the bane of every person’s existence. These ruts could go on for a week, a month, a year, or even decades. After all, life happens, time gets thin, and expectations get higher. The most consistent solution is simple: to set a tight deadline, and to deliver something by that time. And possibly…
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What It’s Like to Write Articles with Artificial Intelligence
I see GPT-3 both as a threat to the conventional notion of writing, but also as a great new tool for authors. Perhaps an analogy is useful here: I’m a calligrapher, and I learn about the Gutenberg press. It makes sense to learn how to work together with GPT-3 as a collaborator, especially when cost…
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How to Make Art Without Worrying About Money
In Toronto Life, Steve Kupferman writes of surviving an illegal rooming house in Kensington Market. I’ll leave the descriptive bits to him, but what’s notable is how he actually got out of that situation [emphasis added]: My landlord patched up the bathroom, but he never fixed the roof. The leak spread to my bedroom, forcing…
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Shopify’s Founder Tobias Lütke on Creativity and Constraints
I recently dug up an archive of Shopify founder and CEO Tobias Lütke’s old blog, which linked to this interview with Signal v. Noise. Given Shopify’s impact, if you’re an entrepreneur, founder, or programmer, the whole thing is worth the read, particularly how well Shopify—at 28 people in Ottawa—adapted to constraints. For example, Shopify was…
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Without a Word: How Kanye West Launched His Album Donda to His Church
On Thursday, July 22, 2021, Kanye West set up his sanctuary at Mercedes Benz stadium, a listening party for his upcoming album Donda. The event sold out a few days prior, with a capacity of 42,000. Trapital’s Dan Runcie does some napkin math and sums it up well, “Very few artists can pull that off.”…
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How Parasocial Relationships Help Us Learn About Others and Ourselves
I forget the year, but Facebook was only starting to catch up to Myspace, YouTube was shiny new, and I had just started blogging. Sometime around here, my friends and I watched one of Ryan Leslie’s videos—probably this one, with him playing all the instruments he needed to make a song. He had produced the…