Merce Cardus's Blog, page 85

Dealing With Clarity and Mystery–In Design and Life

Video of the day: The Art of Firt Impressions–In Design and Life

You know a Chip Kidd book when you see it — precisely because it’s unexpected, non-formulaic, and perfectly right for the text within. As a graphic designer for Alfred A. Knopf since 1986, Kidd has designed shelves full of books, including classics you can picture in a snap: Jurassic Park, Naked by David Sedaris, All the Pretty Horses …

His monograph,Chip Kidd: Book One, contains work spanning two decades. He’s anovelist as wel...

Happy Birthday, Ernest Hemingway!

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899– July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist.

His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

He published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises,in 1926,For Whom the Bell Tolls(1940), andThe Old Man and The Sea...

TUESDAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing, Self-publishing, and Better Living: Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

Photo Credit: detbuzzsaw via Compfight cc

Quote of the day:

This day, I vow to myself to love myself, to treat myself as someone I love truly and deeply – in my thoughts, my actions, the choices I make, the experiences I have, each moment I am conscious, I make the decision I LOVE MYSELF.

~KAMAL RAVIKANT, author ofLove Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

WRITING

The key to writing 3-dimensional characters, Write on sisters| Tweet

The most common advice I’ve heard for writing three-dime...

Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader

InAct Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader,HerminiaIbarra, an expert on professional leadership and development and a renowned professor at INSEAD, turns the usual “think first and then act” philosophy on its head by arguing that doing these three things will help you learn through action and will increase what she calls youroutsight—the valuable external perspective you gain from direct experiences and experimentation.

As opposed to insight, outsight will then help change the way you think as...

What Makes A Hero?

What trials unite not only Harry Potter or Frodo Baggins but many of literature’s most interesting heroes? And what do ordinary people have in common with these literary heroes? Matthew Winkler takes us step-by-step through the crucial events that make or break a hero.

What do Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, and Frodo all have in common with the heroes of ancient myths?
What if I told you they are all variants of the same hero?
Do you believe that?
Joseph Campbell did.

He studied myths fro...

WEEKEND LINKS ~ Reads on Writing, Self-publishing, and Better Living: The Art Of Empathy

Photo Credit: Lola and Yukao Meet via Compfight cc

Quote of the day

Empathy is everywhere: it’s the air you breathe and the ground you walk on; it makes relationships, communities, and societies work. And yet, empathy can also be something of a mystery. Because empathy is such a central part of everything you do, you can overlook it and almost ignore the processes that make empathy work (or stop working).

~KARLA MCLAREN, author ofThe Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential...

The Magic that Leads us to Live a Charmed Life

New Magic for a New Era: How to Live a Charmed Lifeis a book of magic. When we get out of our own way, magic opens doors for us that take us down new and unimaginable paths.

This practical book is about how to undertake a personal transformation of a different, more subtle yet more powerful, nature.

Mindful Time Management

›Like the lack of money, the lack of time is perhaps the next biggest excuse for us not achieving our dreams. The two, of course, are interlinked.

The secret to living s...

9 Secrets of Happiness–In 60 Seconds

InTaking Responsibility: Self-Reliance and the Accountable LifeDr. Nathaniel Branden defines happy people as people that process their experiences so that, as quickly as possible, positives are held in the foreground of conciousness and negatives are consigned to the background. He offers us to begin each day with two questions:

What’s good in my life? What needs to be done?

Hours of thought by the team at the School of Life have led them to a 60 second film, summarising a lot of what th...

THURSDAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing, Self-publishing and Better Living: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Photo Credit: Conanil via Compfight cc

Quote of the day

Habit 1: Be Proactive
Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
Habit 3: Put First Things First
Habit 4: Think Win/Win
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
Habit 6: Synergize
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw.

~STEPHEN R. COVEY, author ofThe 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

WRITING

How to improve your writing: 5 Secrets from Hollywood, Barking up the wrong tree| Tweet

Want to know how toi...

Overcome Resistance, Do The Work

Could you be getting in your way of producing great work? Have you started a project but never finished? Would you like to do work that matters, but don’t know where to start? The answer isDo the Work: Overcome Resistance and Get Out of Your Own Way, a manifesto by bestselling author Steven Pressfield, that will show you that it’s not about better ideas, it’s about actually doing the work.

Our enemies

The following is a list of the forces arrayed against us artists and entrepreneurs:

1. Res...