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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…
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Just leave the bags at home?
You leave your house to buy groceries before your dinner plans. “But wait,” your brain says, “There’s more than enough time for you to jog over to your favorite coffee shop and write.” You haven’t been in a long time, so you pack your laptop and fill up your water bottle, and you head out…
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Cold-blooded creative work
Patrick Dubroy writes: You see, warm-blooded animals — like humans or mice — have a stable body temperature that stays within a pretty narrow range. For humans, it’s around 37 degrees Celsius. A few degrees higher or lower and we’re in big trouble. Cold-blooded animals like the painted turtle can adapt their metabolism to the…
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No bad ideas, no good ideas
One of my teachers told me about a student who was generally quiet, but when they spoke up, they said something brilliant. I always wished that quality for myself, but unfortunately, that’s not the case at all. That’s not how my brain works naturally. My good ideas are usually accompanied by bad ideas as well.…