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“Producing is about discouraging creativity”
That’s a lesson Tina Fey learned from Lorne Michaels, which she describes in Bossypants: You would think that as a producer, your job would be to churn up creativity, but mostly your job is to police enthusiasm. Editors also need to do this, and frankly it’s probably one of the least fun aspects of the…
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Do you want to be known for that?
Sarah Cooper gained a lot of momentum through her Trump lip synchs, and made the decision to stop them. She says, “I feel like I kind of have to use it as a propellant, but I also have to escape it in a way. Like, I don’t want to be known as the ‘lip-synching girl.’”…
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Restraint
A few days ago, I woke up to the word, “Restraint.” I like this phrase, “If ‘the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do,’ as Michael Porter famously wrote, then the essence of execution is truly not doing it.” One very tangible example comes from editing, where I learned to use rich words…
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Essentials week: Write down 10 ideas
My next post from essentials week, a short collection of the best posts at this blog. This time, it’s an excerpt from my book that several readers have reached out to me about: You can write down or draw out any idea you like. If your interest is in architecture or interior design and you…
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Essentials week: What Does It Mean to Be a Creative Person?
My next post from essentials week, a short collection of the best posts at this blog. Here’s an excerpt: Creativity is just about creating something—focusing on the process, discovering new possibilities, and actually doing the work. That’s why children are creative; they haven’t had years of labels applied and stuck to them yet. They don’t…
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Essentials week: This Four Stage Creative Process Shows You How to Unlock Your Creativity
In this article, we’ll look at the creative process from the most popular conventional one, the four-stage creative process described in London School of Economics co-founder Graham Wallas’s The Art of Thought in 1926. In the spirit of collaborative creativity, it’s important to mention that many people have since put their own spin on it,…
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Essentials week: On quitting, failing, and, “I find a lot of people who should quit don’t”
My next post from essentials week, a short collection of the best posts at this blog. Here’s an excerpt: Perhaps in some cases, quitting needs to be redefined, or reframed, as creating a life. Even art and work are just two aspects of a life. The extremities are framed as homelessness or do a soul-crushing…
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Essentials week: Bill Watterson, Picasso, and HN on self promotion
My next post from essentials week, a short collection of the best posts at this blog. Here’s an excerpt: Moreover, when self-promotion is done right, it never looks like self-promotion. The most obvious examples of self-promotion we see are also the often the ugliest ones; a link pasted here, spam there, and Twitter threads of…
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Essentials week: 8 Lessons from 800 Note Cards in the Zettelkasten
My next post from essentials week, a short collection of the best posts at this blog. Here’s an excerpt: If there’s anything I’m sure of, it’s that I’m “doing” the original Zettelkasten method technically incorrectly. Ryan Holiday uses the word “perverted” to describe his own note-taking method compared to the one he learned from Robert…
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Essentials week: Don’t think to write, write to think
Since I started writing daily, I’ve now published over 700 blog posts. I wanted to highlight 7 posts this week, so I’ll choose one good post per day. Most of these will be greatest hits—the most popular, discussed, shared, etc.—some may be a deep cut or a next step, or an excerpt from my book…