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Creative Doing, at Creative Odyssey
I appeared as a guest on Emil Drud’s Creative Odyssey podcast. We talked about Creative Doing, Prologue, and my career path, amidst all sorts of other stuff. This feels like one of my better guest appearances. It was also one of the first podcasts I’ve joined since starting New Material. As I was listening to…
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A good example is worth the effort
Finding good examples, references, and stories is one of the most important, and undervalued, aspects of writing. It remains a good opportunity to make your work better: Is the example too well known and common? Can a reader relate to this? Does this example say what I want it to say? Does the metaphor work?…
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World building, observations, and names
A couple of years ago, I wrote about how one way to see branding was to build a world. I currently work as the director of marketing at FGX. One of the aspects that continues to energize me is the depth of thought the leaders put into defining the world of global IT logistics. They’ve…
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A lesson this blog has taught me
I write here every day, and I don’t take it for granted. It’s not difficult for me to imagine a world where I stopped writing altogether. It almost happened a decade ago. (I mentioned it here briefly.) While I wrote very wholeheartedly at the time, I also didn’t treat my work very well. I felt…
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Discover what you want to say by writing every day
I was reading a post I wrote recently, and I realized that I’d actually excerpted the same quote twice. That was inevitable—I’ve written over 1,000 posts at this point—and it created an opening for me to explore why it continues to resonate throughout the years. I started reading each of the related posts as well.…
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Your brain’s ecosystem
Virgil Abloh really DJed. Music, hanging out, and DJing shaped his brain—they were key fundamentals to his ecosystem. This ecosystem would enable him to take his skills and approach into fashion and creative direction. I write every day at this blog. It’s a key part of my ecosystem. In a recent interview, I was reminded…
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Sleeping just enough
A few years ago, I started experiencing fragmented sleep. One of the first things I did was buy a book entitled, Quiet Your Mind and Get to Sleep. It came with a worksheet to help keep track of how much sleep you had, what the circumstances were, etc. I tracked this for 12 weeks or…
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Don’t just talk about it, write it out
There is a lot of jargon in the business world. That’s because it’s easy to give something a name and talk about it. It’s much more difficult to give meaning to the name and define it. Writing the new definition out forces you to get clear on the specifics of what it means. It also…