Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses

Generalizing from film production, a producer can engage in the parallel creative process of bringing an idea into the market.

Following lighthouse questions is inherently risky because they concern the unknown and unknowable future, but trusting a pattern that worked in the past is risky too. The world is always changing regardless.

within the frameworks of operating a business. Those mindsets and tools come together to support the process of art, and all of the vulnerability, risk of failure, actual failure, negotiation, and surprise involved in open-endedly and openheartedly creating the life—and the working life—you want.

It doesn’t matter just that you have a brilliant idea or a gorgeous design object. You also have a responsibility to try to make those creative works exist in the economic world. Anytime you find yourself walking one of those diagonals, you are taking on the work of a producer.

You have the exacting and constant task of protecting ideas while also being honest and sometimes challenging about their development. You are not executing on a vision but balancing how to be rigorous without being controlling, and how to be encouraging without interfering. Your work is essential and indirect.

By not trying to jump to the end, she is giving herself ways of staying at the easel of her own decision instead of sitting in the armchair hoping it will all come together.

That simple observation led to the distinction between fixed costs—those that you incur no matter how much you produce—and variable costs—those like materials that you only incur when you produce something. The distinction led Wedgwood to realize the advantages of specializing in product lines where he could produce larger quantities of the same go

Leonardo wrote, “If you stay doggedly at the work you will deceive yourself.”

the Bauhaus, the German school and social experiment started in 1919 and disbanded in 1933. The Bauhaus took as its founding mission the connection of the creative and commercial arts.

think in terms of constructing your income and investment portfolios and then to own shares in your own projects.