Open Notes

Designing is Thinking

A few years back I was hard at work organizing the semester-long schedule for a non-profit program. After roughly laying everything out, I realized there were so many events that simply placing them all on a physical calendar would be overwhelming.

While any calendar app would have been helpful in presenting the schedule, at

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Taming The Beast

While artists have many directives, a core component of our calling is found in taming the beast of our creative inclinations. On the surface, taming the beast may sound restrictive (or just weird) but in reality, it's nothing more (or less) than focusing our creative efforts, which eventually becomes the mechanism by which we learn

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Make it A Policy

Often, we prefer to avoid making mistakes and create algorithms (of sorts) composed of unique sets of values, resources, and trusted relationships to ease the decision making process.

While a multifaceted strategic assessment seems arduous, it can offer substantial benefits. The most noteworthy advantage of creating a helpful

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Watching Doesn’t Count

Content styles like vlogs, reactions, and reviews are extremely popular and it seems like we’ve become satisfied with consuming, as opposed to experiencing both the novel and mundane. In practice, we are content with trading the ability to experience a new restaurant, purchase a good, or visit a landmark for the ability to

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In Constant Motion

We inhabit a universe that is in constant motion, which means our surroundings are constantly changing. Every second of every day is different from the one that came before and the one that will follow. Change is inevitable, even if our senses can’t detect what’s different.

While we may act as if constant change only applies to

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Allocating Capacity

Regardless of how we feel, capacity is not something to be solved or optimized, it’s a resource to be measured and allocated.

What's more, unless we have a lot of fidelity to significantly change our lives, our capacity will likely stay the same. Therefore, our ability to increase our sum is more or less a moot point.

Growing our

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When “That” is Better Than “How”

Often when our goal is objective, a good way to achieve it is to think in terms of “how.” How we’ll get the funds to finance our business, how we’ll convince our friends to take a group vacation, how we’ll shape our piece of walnut into a hand carved spoon.

Fortunately, not every problem is best solved with a “how”

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The Lifestyle Barrier

The Lifestyle Barrier represents the contextualized work it will take any person pursuing any activity to build and develop skill. In essence, the Life Style Barrier is the culmination of the effort, time, and capacity it will take to continue growing. For most, approaching the Life Style Barrier (LB) represents the end of the

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Measure What Matters

A potentially helpful strategy for learning to take note of our progress could be to find a better scale. Fortunately, better as it pertains to a scale used to measure our growth isn’t really about being able to detect smaller changes or collect more data. Better, when it comes to noticing how far we’ve come is about being

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