digital garden

What differentiates someone who paints every day in private, and someone who paints every day and posts about it on Instagram? Nothing besides the act of practicing their craft in public- and that’s not what defines the act.

For whatever reason, labelling yourself as anything when you’re brought up in a world with social media, only tends to feel right when there’s an element of public sharing. But why should we feel better owning our passions as a part of who we are only when we’re practicing them in front of an audience? An audience or lack thereof doesn’t define... See more

creativity for the sake of creativity.

If there's any kind of lesson in all this, it's mostly some advice I want to give myself.

The lesson is simply: speak up .

It's OK to slip into advocacy now and then, so long as you do it tastefully. If it sounds high- or heavy-handed — or anything like nagging — you're doing it wrong. Just explain why you care about a particular value. The goal... See more

Most people think of secrets as Easter eggs. They assume that if a secret is important, it’s necessarily going to be hard to find. The best ideas can come from things that are so well-known that they aren’t well-seen.

“This happens a lot, that feeling when I can’t remember if I thought a thought or if a book planted it in my brain, and it’s just now popped up from wherever it was hiding. Part of my fate as a greedy, acquisitive reader is that I can never escape the overbearing presence of books, whether in the mind or on the shelf. I wonder if, without them, I’d... See more