Creativity
Honour your creativity
In many ways, I feel fortunate that we built Poolsuite, Vacation® and other projects before AI became as accessible as it is now. That time gave me a runway to hone the skill of being creative. But the other day, I found myself slipping into a terrible new habit, and turning to ChatGPT before I even gave my brain 30 seconds to... See more
In many ways, I feel fortunate that we built Poolsuite, Vacation® and other projects before AI became as accessible as it is now. That time gave me a runway to hone the skill of being creative. But the other day, I found myself slipping into a terrible new habit, and turning to ChatGPT before I even gave my brain 30 seconds to... See more
PALM REPORT
When there's a deadline, there's also a destination, a context, a reason for something. And that's what makes me finish it. Up until that point, it's an experiment. It's sitting on my shelf and I can take it down again as I often do, work on it again, put it back on. [Then I can take it] out two years later and work on it some more.
So everything's... See more
So everything's... See more
“When there’s a deadline, there’s also a destination, a context, a reason for something…”—is attributed to Brian Eno. This idea appears in his public lectures and interviews, notably at the Red Bull Music Academy in 2013, where Eno discusses how deadlines transform creative experiments into finished work.
The idea is that reasoning from first principles is reasoning like a scientist. You take core facts and observations and use them to puzzle together a conclusion, kind of like a chef playing around with raw ingredients to try to make them into something good. By doing this puzzling, a chef eventually writes a new recipe. The other kind of... See more
Tim Urban • How to Pick a Career
Contrast this with Henrik Karlsson on the importance of “context”. Somewhere in the spectrum? Or a different axis from creating vs. copying altogether?
There are two modes of information discovery: foraging and hunting. Foraging is passive. You don’t have a clear goal; you just wander and scroll until something catches your interest. Hunting is active and purposeful. You know what you’re looking for and are consciously searching for it. A good information diet needs both: Foraging helps us decide... See more
Sari Azout • The End of Productivity
To and Fro
Most of the time when we feel stuck, it’s not because we don’t have ideas.
It’s because our ideas aren’t moving.
Today I looked up the word circulation, and one part of the definition grabbed me by the collar:
“Movement to and fro or around something.”
To and fro.
It feels like the rhythm of thinking itself.
Ideas come to you — in the shower,
... See moreChristopher Alexander has an observation about problem solving that I like: you should always be focusing on solving the part that has the fewest degrees of freedom.
When figuring out how to design a kitchen, for instance, there are a bunch of subproblems to solve: where to put the stove and the windows and the kitchen... See more
Henrik Karlssonsubstack.comdegrees of freedom