The creative adult is the child who survived.
- U. LeGuin
(via visualnews)
The Creative Adult
Christoph Niemann on Creativity:
“In order to have creativity, you have to allow for dead ends to happen.”
– Christoph Niemann, at CreativeMornings
Values
Spend your life doing what you love.
Be focused and disciplined.
Collaborate.
Eulogy of stuff
When an item is in dispute (meaning I want to sell, toss, or recycle it and the kids need to keep it), we take a photo and stick the photo in a book, where they get to write a small eulogy about it. Then it goes out. You’d be amazed how this small project has taught them to view what is special and what is not.
From a comment on an Apartment Therapy post, by slocumnavigator
(Thank you Monica)
On Clutter
When your environment is cluttered, the chaos restricts your ability to focus. The clutter also limits your brain’s ability to process information. Clutter makes you distracted and unable to process information as well as you do in an uncluttered, organized, and serene environment.
Scientists find physical clutter negatively affects your ability to focus, process information | Unclutterer
(via unconsumption / PSFK)
The Sum Total of Our Choices
“We’re all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale, most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, Human happiness does not seem to be included in the design of creation. it is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even try to find joy from simple things, like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.”
— Professor Levy played by Martin S. Bergmann, a New York University clinical professor in psychology, in the movie Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) by Woody Allen.
(Via QuoteVadis)
On Your Way Here
“The people that I respect the most, the people who are doing great things, are people who care so much about what they do that they can’t stop.” – Liz Danzico
(A quotation from the sparkling, new On Your Way Here, an interview magazine from Dave Dawson.)
The Creator Economy
“Now we are entering a third age in which the central economic actor is someone who both produces and consumes in the same act. I like the term ‘creator,’ as this new kind of actor is doing something more fundamental than the mere sum of their simultaneous production and consumption. Creators are ordinary people whose everyday actions create value.”
- Paul Saffo on “The Creator Economy”
(via Khoi)
Kind Of A Big Deal
Never despise small beginnings, and don’t belittle your own accomplishments. Remember them and use them as inspiration as you go on to the next thing. When you venture outside your comfort zone, wherever the starting point may be, it’s kind of a big deal.
- Chris Guillebeau, Kind Of A Big Deal
Public Speaking
“When I was a child it was called talking back, now it’s called Public Speaking. It’s really all the same!”
Quote from the Public Speaking Trailer, below:
(via KrisLane)
Days are getting shorter
“You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can’t put things off thinking you’ll get to them someday. If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will. So I’m very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it.”
Nora Ephron
Film Director, Producer, Screenwriter, Novelist
(via Design Thought Leader)
Life / Career
“I don’t think of my life as a career. I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That’s not a career – it’s a life!”
— Steve Jobs
(via quotevadis)
Paul Graham on Simplicity
When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance. – Paul Graham
(Taken from the essay Taste for Makers)
A Word On Statistics
A Word On Statistics, by Wislawa Szymborska:
Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.
Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.
Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.
Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.
Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.
Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.
Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.
Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.
Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.
Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.
Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.
Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.
Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).
Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.
Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.
But if it takes effort to understand:
three.
Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.
Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred –
a figure that has never varied yet.
(translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)
(via Caterina Fake)
it’s not the end.
The above quote caught my eye and made me smile. The poster hangs at the Mild Bunch HQ and features their studiomate’s @robeam’s tweet, immortalised as a poster by Erskine Design for New Adventures. Too bad it’s not for sale anywhere. Or is it?
Update: A commenter below states that this is a quote by Fernando Sabino.
inbox walk of shame
I agree with @Everyplace, “inbox walk of shame” is one of my favorite new terms.
Lawrence Pearsall Jacks on Work
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
— Lawrence Pearsall Jacks
Yes! Yes! Yes!
(via caterina.net)
Potential for Happiness
Experiences — those that we have the potential to create opportunities for — can amplify happiness. While we can’t predict or control what people will or won’t do, we can create potential.
…
Even if the entire experience isn’t a good one, people may not remember it. Founder of behavioral economics and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s research reports on the “peak-end” rule, which shows what we remember about the pleasurable quality of an experience is determined almost entirely by two things: 1. how we feel when experiences are at their peak, and 2. how we feel when experiences have ended. We rely on these two-part summaries to remind us of how we felt about experiences. The summary is the one we remember. We’re taking happiness shortcuts.
…
Excerpts from Liz’s interesting post: What we talk about when we talk about happiness
Milton Glaser on teaching
Fundamentally I teach because it makes me feel good. It helped me certainly clarify my own objectives. There’s nothing more exciting than seeing someone’s life affected in a positive way by something you’ve said.
— Milton Glaser on why he teaches
George Sand on Happiness
“One is happy as a result of one’s own efforts, once one knows of the necessary ingredients of happiness — simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self-denial to a point, love of work, and, above all, a clear conscience. Happiness is no vague dream, of that I now feel certain.”
— George Sand
(via the Happiness Project Newsletter)
Know what you are about
“If you don’t know who you are or what you’re about or what you believe in it’s really pretty impossible to be creative.”
(Thank you Liz)
