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Why habit is the secret of creativity. Chuck Close would agree: ...

Wed, 22 May 2013 19:30:00 -0400

Chuck Close would agree: “Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.” As would E. B. White: “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”

"I do it for me and like-minded people. That’s it. That’s it. My career, I look at it in..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:59:46 -0400

“I do it for me and like-minded people. That’s it. That’s it. My career, I look at it in a Darwinian framework. I’m going to do exactly what I want, and I’m going to survive or I’m not. I’m not going to pander, I’m not going to change things, I’m not going to do focus groups. I’ll live and die by the sword. I don’t care. Because I couldn’t live with myself.”

- Ricky Gervais knows a thing or two about creative integrity and purpose over prestige.

Essential reading/viewing: Arianna Huffington on redefining...

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:42:07 -0400

Essential reading/viewing: Arianna Huffington on redefining success.

"I begin my work at about nine or ten o’clock in the evening, and continue until four or five in the..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:22:00 -0400

“I begin my work at about nine or ten o’clock in the evening, and continue until four or five in the morning. Night is a more quiet time to work. It aids thought.”

- Alexander Graham Bell, who was evidently a late chronotype, on creativity, innovation, and success.

Pair with the daily routines of famous creators.

"What’s the impulse behind art? It’s saying in whatever language is the language of your..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:32:00 -0400

“What’s the impulse behind art? It’s saying in whatever language is the language of your work, “If I could move you as much as it moved me … if I can move anyone a tenth as much as that moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery and awe and surprise as that sparked in me, well that’s why I do what I do.””

- Greil Marcus on the essence of art.

"The strategy is to have a practice, and what it means to have a practice is to regularly and..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:23:57 -0400

“

The strategy is to have a practice, and what it means to have a practice is to regularly and reliably do the work in a habitual way.

[…]

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. Because lots and lots of people are creative when they feel like it, but you are only going to become a professional if you do it when you don’t feel like it. And that emotional waiver is why this is your work and not your hobby.

”

- Seth Godin on the daily habits of creative practice.

"The time we have alone, the time we have in walking, the time we have in riding a bicycle — [these]..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:20:19 -0400

“The time we have alone, the time we have in walking, the time we have in riding a bicycle — [these] are the most important times for a writer. Escaping from a typewriter is part of the creative process. You have to give your subconscious time to think. Real thinking always occurs on the subconscious level. I never consciously set out to write a certain story. The idea must originate somewhere deep within me and push itself out in its own time. Usually, it begins with associations.”

- Ray Bradbury on storytelling and the creative process

Edna St. Vincent Millay on the love of music – a beautiful 1920...

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:17:29 -0400

Edna St. Vincent Millay on the love of music – a beautiful 1920 letter.

"Money and power by themselves are a two-legged stool — you can balance on them for a while, but..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:16:31 -0400

“Money and power by themselves are a two-legged stool — you can balance on them for a while, but eventually you’re going to topple over.”

- Arianna Huffington on redefining success – her 2013 Smith College commencement address.

The Pace of Productivity - how to master your creative routine.

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:47:52 -0400

The Pace of Productivity - how to master your creative routine.

"For years Lady Doyle was his constant companion, accompanying him on all his travels. It was to her..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:00:00 -0400

“

For years Lady Doyle was his constant companion, accompanying him on all his travels. It was to her the dying novelist spoke his last words.

“You are wonderful,” he said with a smile.

”

- The original New York Times obituary for Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, born on May 22, 1859, who died of a heart attack on July 7, 1930.

Honor him with a wonderful read on how to think like Sherlock Holmes.

Gorgeous vintage map of the Moscow metro, 1980. Pair with...

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:40:00 -0400

Gorgeous vintage map of the Moscow metro, 1980. Pair with Transit Maps of the World.

(↬ Radiolab)

"The whole design looks like it was the result of a pile of indecisive internal meetings where an..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:00:00 -0400

“The whole design looks like it was the result of a pile of indecisive internal meetings where an enormous committee ran rampant, suggesting interventions that would make the logo look active.”

- The brilliant Paula Scher on why she hates the Verizon logo. Also see Scher on how creativity works.

(↬ Quipsologies)

Brian Cox

Tue, 21 May 2013 22:06:00 -0400

Brian Cox

If there ever was tragically visceral evidence of how remix...

Tue, 21 May 2013 21:32:26 -0400

If there ever was tragically visceral evidence of how remix culture fuels creativity and copyright hinders it, it is this: Despite – or perhaps because of – millions of views in less than a week, The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust has filed a copyright claim against the wildly popular YouTube version of the wonderful short film adaptation of Wallace’s timeless 2005 commencement address, This Is Water. (Luckily, you can still watch the film on Vimeo – but that’s beside the point.)

Here is an example of a project made out of love, the existence of which harms the estate in no way, financial or otherwise, but serves the public good by way of cultural preservation and celebration of Wallace’s spirit and legacy, extending his message and allowing it to touch more lives. That the estate finds any of this harmful is gobsmacking, at once an aberration of the law and a complete failure of cultural duty.

The Russian-born novelist’s writing habits were famously...

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:28:59 -0400

The Russian-born novelist’s writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which he stored in long file boxes. Since, Nabokov claimed, he pictured an entire novel in complete form before he began writing it, this method allowed him to compose passages out of sequence, in whatever order he pleased; by shuffling the cards around, he could quickly rearrange paragraphs, chapters, and whole swaths of the book. (His file box also served as portable desk; he started the first draft of Lolita on a road trip across America, working nights in the backseat of his parked car — the only place in the country, he said, with no noise and no drafts.) Only after months of this labor did he finally relinquish the cards to his wife, Vera, for a typed draft, which would then undergo several more rounds of revisions.

Nabokov’s curious daily rituals

"Where the inspirational figure is selected for us, and the gap between their life and ours is too..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:19:29 -0400

“

Where the inspirational figure is selected for us, and the gap between their life and ours is too great, the effect is not one of encouragement but of disillusionment - especially if their story is told in terms of personal qualities like bravery or persistence.

Knowing a famous person has the same impairment as you can be reassuring, but only in the vague way that hearing of a successful distant relative is reassuring.

Most of us will never scale Everest, compete for our country at sports or have a showbiz career. This doesn’t mean we’ve failed.

”

- For BBC’s Mental Health Awareness Week, Mark Brown questions the value of glorifying role models who share our own disabilities and pathologies.

A flipside of the same coin to consider is the perilous “tortured genius” myth of creativity, which implies that depression, addiction, and other mental health issues that plagued some successful creators were central to their genius. The human antidotes to this mythology are worthy role models.

"Short sleep duration and decreased sleep quality are emerging risk factors for obesity and its..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:20:34 -0400

“Short sleep duration and decreased sleep quality are emerging risk factors for obesity and its associated morbidities. Chronotype, an attribute that reflects individual preferences in the timing of sleep and other behaviors, is a continuum from morningness to eveningness. The importance of chronotype in relation to obesity is mostly unknown. Evening types tend to have unhealthy eating habits and suffer from psychological problems more frequently than Morning types, thus we hypothesized that eveningness may affect health parameters in a cohort of obese individuals reporting sleeping less than 6.5 hours per night.”

- Researchers find evening chronotypes, a.k.a. “night owls,” are at higher risk for obesity, stress, and other health perils. Find out more about the science of your chronotype and how sleep affects your day-to-day, including your mood.

"The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:09:25 -0400

“

The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does.

Let me separate the two words and begin with what it means to become a programmer.

The first requirement for programming is a passion for the work, a deep need to probe the mysterious space between human thoughts and what a machine can understand; between human desires and how machines might satisfy them.

The second requirement is a high tolerance for failure. Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.

[…]

Now to the “woman” question.

I broke into the ranks of computing in the early 1980s, when women were just starting to poke their shoulder pads through crowds of men. There was no legal protection against “hostile environments for women.” I endured a client — a sweaty man with pendulous earlobes — who stroked my back as I worked to fix his system. At any moment I expected him to snap my bra. I considered installing a small software bomb but understood, right then, what was more important to me than revenge: the desire to create good systems.

I had a boss who said flatly, “I hate to hire all you girls but you’re too damned smart.” By “all” he meant three but, at the time, it was rare to find even one woman in a well-placed technical position. At a meeting, he kept interrupting me to say, “Gee, you sure have pretty hair.” By then I realized he was teaching me a great deal about computing. It would be a complicated professional relationship, in which his occasional need for male dominance would surface.

So, on that day of my pretty hair, I leaned to one side and said, “I’m just going to let that nonsense fly over my shoulder.” The meeting went on. We discussed the principles of relational databases, which later led me to explore deeper reaches of programming, closer to operating systems and networks, where I would find my real passion for the work. My leaning to one side, not confronting him, letting him be the flawed man he was, changed the direction of my technical life.

”

- Pioneering software engineer Ellen Ullman, author of the fascinating Close to the Machine, on how to be a ‘woman programmer.’ Also see the letters of the women who helmed the tectonic cultural shift of the era Ullman describes.

Pair with Margaret Atwood on literature’s ‘woman problem’ and Caitlin Moran on how to be a woman.

Raymond Chandler

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:00:00 -0400

Raymond Chandler