Archive for the 'Creativity' Category

When Exposing Yourself To New Interesting Things, Make It Closely Related To Your Core Skills

Monday, August 24th, 2009

Spend 80% of your time on your passions, improving your core skills. There are plenty of things you can find that simply meet the “interesting” criteria.
The argument that colleges expose you to things you wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to is not that compelling a value proposition because it is not very hard to find new [...]

Upward Market Pressure on Creativity

Friday, August 21st, 2009

I recently followed a link to this article on Wired profiling the first scientific discovery made by a machine with no human intervention.
This doesn’t signal the end of the role human scientists. Instead it puts increasing upward pressure on scientists developing their creative faculties. And this trend is not prevalent just in science. Everything that [...]

Longer Incubation Periods

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

On Thursday Morning, I was fortunate enough to sit down with Alan Webber over an early morning coffee, who founded Fast Company over a decade ago.
We were talking about some of the skills young people should have in order to launch successful ventures.
Alan noted that while someone is trying to get a startup going there [...]

Have Something Your Continually Thinking About For A Long Time

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

I think it’s important to become obsessed with an idea and to continually critique and iterate it, to expand the vision and then shrink it down. To get lots of feedback and talk to everybody about how you can improve your idea, and assess how to make it most valuable to your customers. Even if [...]

Getting Excited Is Just The First Step

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

So many people write about the solutions they’ve found and the things they’ve discovered. I rarely see people write about they problems they are confronting, the different factors they are weighing, the sacrifices they are making and ultimately how they decide. We hear success stories all the time, that follow a traditional story arc: at [...]

Lessons from Sports: Focusing On The Right Things

Monday, June 15th, 2009

I’ve written about sports frequently because I think the lessons are incredibly transferable. Athletics are extremely competitive with a long history of results-oriented focus. It’s a huge business, with a lot of attention, money and science aimed at maximizing results. While transferring lessons from a game can be dangerous, because any game is an over [...]

Asking The Right Questions

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Good writing and good conversation seem to have many parallels. In order to continue to write you’re basically having a conversation with yourself and you need to intuitively, or perhaps, sliently whisper the right questions to yourself to prompt an interesting recall or synthesis of information. Asking myself better questions is definitely something I want [...]

Capturing Creativity

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

Captures ideas when you have them. If you don’t, these creative insights will try to flee and bringing them back is a sweat inducing struggle. Creativity is often romanticized but really it’s just making connections between disparate ideas. And it’s actually far easier to be creative when you say to yourself ‘What are some connections [...]

Separating Writer and Editor

Sunday, December 21st, 2008

As I said earlier, it’s a bit overwhelming approaching this blog as blank slate. It feels similar to what it must be like standing at the base Mount Everest, confronting an almost insurmountable challenge.
Internally my mind is like a well-developed spider web consisting of many intertwined, interdependent thoughts. How do I begin to approach such [...]