Alex Dobrenko

“By the time I reached adulthood I was pretty sure I was creative, and I considered this a good thing. I grew up in the 1980s in a milieu in which creativity was encouraged. My parents signed me up for pottery and music lessons and something called Odyssey of the Mind, where kids competed against students from other schools in skits and in quickly

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One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion.To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle... See more

“The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.” — Robert Pirsig

Listen! This is how stories used to begin. It is the opening word of Beowulf , the oldest piece of English literature. We don’t know who wrote it, but it almost certainly began as an oral tradition, and it reveals something about storytelling that has never left us. It begins with a call, with a bard asking a crowd to give freely a resource that

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When I was younger, I was never this lucky. It is partly because I was less skilled. But it is also partly because I would interrupt the nonconscious processing back then. Unintentionally, I would tell my brain to focus on something else—a conflict in a TV series I was watching, for instance. I would watch an episode before bed, and the cliffhanger... See more