creativity

Attention is the currency of achievement. Before you can create something worthy of other people’s attention, you have to learn to manage yours. Good art comes from deep focus and deep work. Your ability to become prolific, create art that resonates, touches people’s hearts, and hits people in the face with a crowbar depends on your ability to focu... See more

9. Welcoming the unpredictable. For curious minds, the fact that the world keeps on changing is a feature, not a bug. They believe that their response determines how much disruptions affect them, and they choose to respond with curiosity.

In other words, to produce work and build an audience in the digital context is a dynamic choreography, and to succeed depends on the degree to which your mindset is emergent: Adaptable, responsive, and always in the process of becoming something new.

I think we adults have a similar innate drive to create, and that drive can be supported or stifled by the environment. And, I think that instead of creating environments where we are creative by default , we live in a world where we are distracted by default .

For those of us struggling and aching to say something different, to be distinctly our own, to reject the stifling rationality of the world around us in favor of the symbolic, the creative, and the divine, creating a world is our path.

May we all aspire to be as observant and confident to notice root stairs and call them root stairs, so others could then use the phrase “root stairs.”

Attention + Novelty + Creative Exposition = Insight

Author Robert Greene once said to me, “The more species you have in an ecosystem, the more diverse and rich it will be.” By diversifying your inputs, you build a rich creative ecosystem.

But the only way we can create something out of thin air is because we've built our own system (even if it's just in our minds) that allows us to capture material and references over a lifetime. We then connect these fragments and "milk" them for unexpected connections, which ultimately leads us to truly original ideas.

To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just redo it, redo it, redo it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.