Kindle Notes & Highlights
I’m not an anthropologist, but it seemed to my five-year-old brain that I was experiencing a primal joy as I stared at this light in the darkness. It was probably the same joy cavemen experienced from staring at a campfire in the frigid void of night—except without the giant dancing hot dog part.
The foundation of creative thinking is formed from three critical elements. First, you need a huge amount of information.
Second, you need an untiring interest in your work. Are you obsessed enough with your ideas to play with them into the dead of night—to turn things over in your head and play with the problems of your craft just because that’s what you love to do? You need the passion to bring loads and loads of raw material to consciousness for consideration. And finally, you must have not only the ability, but also the ruthlessness to take out the trash.
Nobody can think of only good ideas or write only touching, sensitive prose all the time. If we’ve done our creative work effectively, first we’ve done our homework; next, we’ve created tons of fodder for thought; and finally, we’ve weeded through our thoughts, separating the rocks from the gems, always mindful that time changes things and today’s rock might be tomorrow’s gem. Sadly, there is no National Bureau of Good Taste, no sole
Choosing between the junk and the genius is called your taste or your gut. It’s that still-small voice inside you that whispers in your ear, “This really stinks” or “This ain’t bad.”
Our ancestors didn’t seem to care much about the meaning of life when they grunted their way out of the primordial ooze. Their only concern was dealing with basic survival. But as their brains grew and their knuckles stopped dragging on the ground, the fundamentals of survival became second nature to them, and they longed for a sense of meaning and belonging in their world.
It wasn’t enough just to build a fire and plow a field; they wanted to know where fire came from and why plants grew. Why had we been put here in the first place, and how could our voices be heard over the vast thunder of the cosmos?
suspend judgment.
So now put yourself in a social setting like a work retreat. You’re having a good time exchanging ideas, writing them down with felt markers on those huge Post-it notepads. Suddenly your boss says to you in a vaguely accusatory tone, “Don, I overheard you talking in your group and it sounded like you had some ideas for better-quality products here at the Widget company. What were those ideas?” Lizard brain, being our social survival coach, immediately speaks up in your head: “This is a setup, he’s going to shoot you down no matter what you say, deflect the question! Keep your mouth shut, keep
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carve out time for your own creative renaissance to take place—time for your dreamer to dream deep, long, satisfying dreams.
We are goal-oriented. We learn to celebrate the completion of a job with pomp and circumstance; the arrival of a product like the iPad is touted with headlines and hyperbole. In all this celebration and marketing, we lose track of the earlier part of the equation: the ideas, materials, and quality that go into the work. This obsession with the end product sets us up for a nasty, lifelong pattern of seemingly endless periods of boredom, stress, and tension while waiting to celebrate, followed by a celebration that is far too short, followed by long periods of boredom, stress, and tension, and
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and pubs,
Disregard pedigree and form an opinion based on how you feel about something. Next time, celebrate Salvator Rosa. Find a Picasso that you hate, some Mozart that doesn’t work for you, a classic movie that everyone else loves but that you find flawed. Find an obscure artist to embrace, an unknown band whose music you love, and a little-known film that moves you deeply.
“you can either tiptoe into the shallow end or jump naked into the deep end. It all depends how
like a bear trap and
and scream a primal scream.
To be creative is to be totally and passionately committed to your work—to be in love with your work and yet be able to separate yourself from it enough to hate it. It means to be completely attached to what you are doing and then to become
completely detached, so that you can criticize and edit your own work. It is a life of pain and vulnerability, of elation and ecstasy. To be creative is to live a life of contradiction.
Glenn Vilppu, my life drawing teacher, had a student once who struggled with drawing so much that he doubted that he would ever be an artist. His drawings were stiff and uncertain. Glenn told him simply this: “You have to wear the beret. You don’t believe that you’re an artist, so you aren’t. You have to believe it.” The key to the student’s drawing wasn’t in his hand or pencil, it was in his mind. You have to start thinking like an artist—believing you’re an artist. Commit your mind, and your drawings will follow.
polka.
There are occupations that for some reason never developed their own jargon and so adopted the jargon of another trade.
décolletage
These big-screen models ooze testosterone, and I was sprouting a full beard just by standing there.
spiel
Infomercials are like car crashes to me—they’re horrible, but I can’t look away.
predisposition
These impressions imprint powerfully on our souls. We can keep these impressions inside, where they build up and clog our drains, or we can spill them out in wonderful, flowing expressions of how we interpret life.
impression without expression equals depression.
Walt Stanchfield
Can you commit at the outset to approaching your preparation and practice with the same zeal that you plan to show on game day? Can you study great painters, and then bring that information to the field when you mix paint and examine color relationships? If you can do those things, when you approach the canvas or the blank piece of paper to create a final work, you will be filled with strong, confident purpose. You will be able to play, paint, or write at the highest level because you have built your creative life on a strong foundation.
shtick
Silence. We stared at the pizza, but it offered no wisdom.
Then, in a moment of divine intervention, the pizza finally spoke.
At the time, Hans worked in an improvised space that he had carved out of the back of a nondescript industrial building on Santa Monica Boulevard.
then, on the next take, out of nowhere, came the now-famous cry in the wilderness that
kinetic fabric of my life,
The War of Art that most of us have two lives: the life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands what he terms resistance. It’s that toxic, unrelenting force that pushes back when we try to assert ourselves. It’s the same force that pushes back our dreams and makes it easy to give up, shut up, and go about our normal unremarkable existence.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with more good-humored inflexibility than most, when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
An honest postmortem
Henri Bergson,
Reinvention? Yes. Stagnation? Never.
It has little to do with anything in nature and a lot to do with factory hours and train schedules.
rummage,
Remember that this personal time-out is your opportunity to collect impressions.
capture that feeling like lightning in a bottle and use it during the rest of the year.
fairly sleepy suburb
flaunt
spoof
“Our Father who art in heaven, Hollow Ed be thy name.”
