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March 10 - March 10, 2020
Scott Belsky, Founder of Behance & author of Making Ideas Happen
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My mantra has always been, “It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.”
Not about blaming but about responsibility
taking a step back, taking stock, and making improvements to our systems.
How we do things determines our breakthroughs
Routines help us do this by setting expectations about availability, aligning our workflow with our energy levels, and getting our minds into a regular rhythm of creating.
If you’re not careful, that area will fill up with e-mail, meetings, and the requests of others, leaving no room for the work you consider important.
Work fills time given it
The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second.
Create then react...prioritize
But it’s better to disappoint a few people over small things, than to surrender your dreams for an empty inbox.
Wow
Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century writer who managed to be a prolific novelist while also revolutionizing the British postal system, observed, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
“It’s the task that’s never started that’s more tiresome,”
“What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.”
The notion that I do my work here, now, like this, even when I do not feel like it, and especially when I do not feel like it, is very important.
Be comfortable with being board
The practice is a big part. The second part of it, which I think is really critical, is understanding that being creative means that you have to sell your ideas.
Practice brings creative juice but then sell it
the person who gets a little freelance work here and there but can’t figure out how to turn it into a full-time gig—that person is practicing self-sabotage.
They are afraid that if they do that, they will be seen as a fraud.
Holy shit...own it. Dont be scred to be thought of as fraud
SETH GODIN has written fourteen books that have been translated into more than thirty languages.
By doing so skillfully, you can get more done in less time, at a higher level of quality, in a more sustainable way.
How to not run on empty
The first is that sleep is more important than food.
Sleep is more important than food
He also noticed he became less reactive.
TONY SCHWARTZ is the president and CEO of The Energy Project, a company that helps organizations fuel sustainable high performance by better meeting the needs of their employees. Tony’s most recent books, Be Excellent at Anything and The Power of Full Engagement (the latter co-authored with Jim Loehr), were both New York Times bestsellers.
How do you meditate? Find a quiet space and sit. Stay upright, keep your eyes open but not focused on anything in particular, and breathe through your nose. Start by noticing your posture, your body. Then focus your attention on your breath, as it comes in and out of your body. Notice your thoughts coming up, acknowledge them, but don’t engage with them. Always return your attention to your breath. Keep doing this for at least a few minutes, and you’re done.
What’s the point of sitting? There is no point—sitting is the point.
Sitting is the point
In 1971, renowned social scientist Herbert Simon observed, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Look at each day as a challenge—and an opportunity—to keep your eye on the prize.
Studies show that the human mind can only truly multitask when it comes to highly automatic behaviors like walking. For activities that require conscious attention, there is really no such thing as multitasking, only task switching—the process of flicking the mind back and forth between different demands.
Laura Bowman and her team at Central Connecticut State University found that students using IM while reading a textbook took about 25 percent longer to read the passage (not including the time spent on IM), compared with students who simply read.
Psychologists demonstrated this in a 2011 study. Participants at the University of Copenhagen were told to perform a computer task. Afterward, some of them were allowed to watch a funny video, while the others were faced with a play button for the video, but had to resist pressing it (akin to a tempting YouTube clip on your computer). When confronted with an additional task afterward, those who had to resist the video performed worse than those who were allowed to watch it.
There isn’t a linear progression and a sense of progress. So I think the big question is: how do we make ourselves feel like we’re making progress? Because if you can create that progress, I think many of the other things would become smaller barriers.
Leigh Michaels, prolific author of more than eighty romance novels, once said that “waiting for inspiration to write is like standing at the airport waiting for a train.”
For his book Willpower, psychologist Roy Baumeister analyzed findings from hundreds of experiments to determine why some people can retain focus for hours, while others can’t. He discovered that self-control is not genetic or fixed, but rather a skill one can develop and improve with practice.8
Keeping track of when energy levels rise and fall will help determine a schedule for alternating between mindful and mindless activities. Once these ebbs and flows are determined, a timer can be used to keep track of, and direct, these shifts to help prevent exhaustion and time-wasting.
Consider it “filling the well,” as poet and artist Julia Cameron once put it. When we turn off one type of stimuli, we unleash another.
Every four months or so, I identify my two or three complex goals and tape a list of them to my desk as a constant reminder.
Keeps the focus on what email is priority
The most important rule in achieving your goals via your inbox is that distracting opportunities have to die for your most important goals to live.
Marshall McLuhan: everything is an extension of our desire for connection.
because we’re both good and bad. We’re both focused and distracted.
stop for a moment in their busy lives and just talk about the curse and talk about the good. Because it’s a positive and a negative.
sustained stress causes us to fall back on familiar routines. The part of our brain associated with decision-making and goal-directed behaviors shrinks and the brain regions associated with habit formation grow when we’re under chronic stress.
And it’s quite frankly easier to do the trivial things that are “urgent” than it is to do the important things. But when we choose urgent over important, what we are really choosing is other people’s priorities over our own.
Bringing incredible creative projects to life demands much hard work down in the trenches of day-to-day idea execution. Genius truly is “1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”
We must also make time for play, relaxation, and exploration, the essential ingredients of the creative insights that help us evolve existing ideas and set new projects in motion.
It also means learning how to put your inner critic on mute, banish perfectionist tendencies, and push through anxiety-inducing creative blocks.
because the greatest enemy of creativity is nothing more than standing still.
The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron discusses a now well-known practice that she calls “morning pages.” She suggests writing three pages of free-flowing thought first thing in the morning as a way to explore latent ideas, break through the voice of the censor in your head, and get your creative juices flowing.
The twentieth-century mystic Thomas Merton wrote, “There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular—and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”
Exercise sharpens brain activity, reports Newsweek: “Almost every dimension of cognition improves from thirty minutes of aerobic exercise, and creativity is no exception.
and the boost lasts for at least two hours afterward.”26 Regular sleep doesn’t hurt, either. According to a Harvard study, with proper sleep and incubation, “People are 33 percent more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas.”
In his book Catching the Big Fish, filmmaker David Lynch suggests that companies can solve productivity problems by advocating meditation:
Stefan Sagmeister is known for his unorthodox approach to creativity. Whether it’s writing a message on the ground of a public square using 250,000 coins or taking a year-long sabbatical every seven years, Sagmeister brings a unique level of meticulous craft and thoughtfulness to his work. As evidenced by his book Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far, he’s also partial to extracting lessons from his life experience. We spoke with him about how brain hacks can lead us to aha moments and why nothing is more important than mapping big creative projects right into your daily schedule.
Stop and ask yourself what kind of block you are experiencing. Once you’re clear about the nature of the problem, it will be easier to solve it.
This is where creativity blends into communication skills. You need to understand and influence the right people. Which means beefing up your presentation, marketing, and networking skills.
Creative people need to be sales people too
