“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.”
– Bruce Lee
Creative Process
Missing From Your Job Description
– Add energy to every conversation
– Ask why
– Find obsolete things on your task list and remove them
– Treat customers better than they expect
– Offer to help co-workers before they ask
– Feed the plants
– Leave things more organized than you found them
– Invent a moment of silliness
– Highlight good work from your peers
– Find other great employees to join the team
– Cut costs
– Help invent a new product or service that people really want
– Get smarter at your job through training or books
– Encourage curiosity
– Surface and highlight difficult decisions
– Figure out what didn’t work
– Organize the bookshelf
– Start a club
– Tell a joke at no one’s expense
– Smile a lot.
I stumbled upon this post again from Seth. Not new. But oh so good.
50 Short Rules for a Better Life (From the Stoics)
Focus on what you can control.
You control how you respond to things.
Ask yourself, “Is this essential?”
Meditate on your mortality every day.
Value time more than money/possessions.
You are the product of your habits.
Remember you have the power to have no opinion.
Own the morning.
Put yourself up for review (Interrogate yourself).
Don’t suffer imagined troubles.
Try to see the good in people.
Never be overheard complaining…even to yourself.
Two ears, one mouth…for a reason (Zeno)
There is always something you can do.
Don’t compare yourself to others.
Live as if you’ve died and come back (every minute is bonus time).
“The best revenge is not to be like that.” Marcus Aurelius
Be strict with yourself and tolerant with others.
Put every impression, emotion, to the test before acting on it.
Learn something from everyone.
Focus on process, not outcomes.
Define what success means to you.
Find a way to love everything that happens (Amor fati).
Seek out challenges.
Don’t follow the mob.
Grab the “smooth handle.”
Every person is an opportunity for kindness (Seneca)
Say no (a lot).
Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Find one thing that makes you wiser every day.
What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee (Marcus Aurelius)
Don’t judge other people.
Study the lives of the greats.
Forgive, forgive, forgive.
Make a little progress each day.
Journal.
Prepare for life’s inevitable setbacks (premeditatio malorum)
Look for the poetry in ordinary things.
To do wrong to one, is to do wrong to yourself. (sympatheia)
Always choose “Alive Time.”
Associate only with people that make you better.
If someone offends you, realize you are complicit in taking offense.
Fate behaves as she pleases…do not forget this.
Possessions are yours only in trust.
Don’t make your problems worse by bemoaning them.
Accept success without arrogance, handle failure with indifference.
Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom. (Always).
The obstacle is the way.
Ego is the enemy.
Stillness is the key.
Found here.
Permission to be Creative
I keep coming back to this gem. This part:
“… It’s so beautiful is the thing that worries me sometimes whenever you talk about creativity, because it can have this kind of feel that it’s just nice, you know, it’s warm or it’s something pleasant.
It’s not it’s vital. It’s the way we heal each other in singing our song and telling our story and inviting you to say, hey, listen to me and I’ll listen to you. We’re starting a dialogue, you know. And when you do that, this healing happens and we come out of our corners and we start to witness each other’s common humanity. We start to assert it. And when we do that, really good things happen. So if you want to help your community, if you want to help your family, if you want to help your friends, you have to express yourself and to express yourself, you have to know yourself.”
Seeing Things
“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
– Henry Miller
The Finest Medicine
“To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.”
– Henry Miller
To put it Simply
“To put it simply –
we are here to become
embodiments of love.”
– Paramatma Siri Sadhana
Let Yourself Be The Milky Way
“You keep worrying
you’re taking up too much space.
I wish you’d let yourself
be the Milky Way.”
– Andrea Gibson
A Universal “Data-base” of Positive Intentions
“Around the world, people create amazing experiences and opportunities. When they do, energetically, it becomes available to everyone. Think of it as a universal database of Creative Consciousness. One that we are all uploading our divine talents to. Therefore, we make them vibrationally accessible to kindred spirits across the globe.”
What is Creative Consciousness?
How can you trust people so much?
“I’m often asked: How can you trust people so much?
Because that’s the only way it works.”
(Thank you Melanie)
A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete – notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing.
Great read: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
Not Judgmental
“Be curious, not judgmental.”
– Walt Whitman
Digital Gardens
“…as I wander the internet, I wonder where the digital gardens are that will connect me to fellow gardeners more deeply. More often than not, the digital gardens of today are botanic—privately owned online spaces made for visitors to fawn over while a “do not touch” sign looms in view. These private gardens are generative for our personal learning, but they are far from the communal gardens I grew up in that valued collective work and knowledge. Where are the digital gardens that lead us towards collective learning, play, and dreaming?”
On Digital Gardens: Tending to Our Collective Multiplicity by Annika Hansteen-Izora
(Thank you Annie)
Magic Happens Through Relationships
“Magic happens through relationships and through faith. How do you build the trust so that people believe that magic is possible? You hae to let people cultivate solidarity and love for each other, individually; almost anything can happen in a room where people have that level of connection with at least a few others in that space. That’s all you need.
– Adrienne Maree Brown
The Ultimate Touchstone of Friendship
“The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
– David Whyte
Practice Any Art
“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
Improve The Silence
“Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.”
– Jorge Luis Borges
Measure Time
“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
– Jorge Luis Borges
Hopping Through Life on One Leg
“It doesn’t matter how sensitive you are or how damn smart and educated you are, if you’re not both at the same time, if your heart and your brain aren’t connected, aren’t working together harmoniously, well, you’re just hopping through life on one leg. You may think you’re walking, you may think you’re running a damn marathon, but you’re only on a hop trip. The connections gotta be maintained.”
– Tom Robbins
A Smooth Hinge
“There is a door between the logical and intuitive worlds, and we must put a smooth hinge on it, and let it swing…”
– Lorna Crozier
Tenderness Towards Yourself
“Developing tenderness towards yourself allows you to see both your problems and your potential accurately. You don’t feel that you have to ignore your problems or exaggerate your potential.”
– Chögyam Trungpa
Kinder
“It’s embarrassing that after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.”
– Aldous Huxley
Makers
“You feel differently towards the world when you make things.”
– Milton Glaser