creativity

But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more

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.

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

Create more than you consume.

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.

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.

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.

Authenticity is derived not from the uniqueness of your idea, but from the personal iterative process of creating meaning that takes place between you and your audience when you show up and share. Your ideas might not be unique, but the meaning made through conversation, collaboration, and interplay, is.

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.

Another good read: Ted Chiang on why Ai isn’t going to make great art, for The New Yorker . I rather liked this analogy:

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way t

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