I have a passion for personalized workspaces.

It all
started when I was eight years old. My friend Jeremy invited me over for
dinner. While we waited for his mom to finish cooking, he showed me around the
house. The place was your typical, run of the mill, midwest two-story home. The
kind of place you’d see in a John Hughes movie.

But the
highlight of the tour was when we snuck into his older brother’s room. And
considering he was captain of the high school football team and pretty much the
coolest guy in the neighborhood, crossing that threshold felt like trespassing
on sacred ground.

And so,
we opened the door, and that moment would be forever etched into my
memory.  Jeremy and I were instantly
overwhelmed by his brother’s floor to ceiling collage of Sports Illustrated magazine covers.

Complete
sensory overload. Greatest thing I ever saw.

And the
first thing I thought to myself was, “You can do that? You can, like, decorate
your own personal space, however you want to?”

You
better believe it.

That day, a light switched on
inside my head that never turned off. I began my lifelong obsession with
personalized workspaces. And although I didn’t realize it at the time, I began
building a system that would later become foundational in my creative life.

For the
next three decades, I became fascinated with customizing, decorating and
optimizing my personal space. From rooms to cars to desks to lockers to closets
to studios to offices, I made it a point to make it my own. Through sight,
sound, touch, smell and even energy, I made it a point to make it my own.

And
what I learned was, you don’t need science or a design background or feng shui
expertise to build your ideal workspace. What matters is that you create a
setting that reflects who you are and what’s important to you, so that the
ideas will flow as a natural consequence of that workspace.

I call
this your primary creative environment.

Not an
office. That’s a dangerous word.

A few
years ago, I did an interview on the topic of home office makeovers for a
writer’s magazine. The reporter asked about how to create a safe, creative and
comfortable haven for your work, and how to maximize productivity based on
personal environment.

I told
them I didn’t have an office. Instead, I said I have a place that’s equal parts
think tank, idea factory, laboratory, command center, studio, rehearsal space,
playground, jungle gym and creative sanctuary.

It’s an
environment that’s personalized, stimulating and makes me feel in control. It’s
my creative nirvana where utopia truly manifests itself. My surroundings help me stay in
harmony with the small slice of the universe in which I find myself. The
various personal patterns and physical objects, from music to visual
stimulation to desk style, echo the rhythm of my thoughts and habits of action.
The consistent surroundings become associative triggers that allow me enter
into my creative zone. And that way, the moment I sit down to work, I can
forget about the rest of the world and concentrate on courting the muse.

Your primary
creative environment is the user interface for your brain and the essential structural
asset for remaining prolific.

Steven
Pressfield, screenwriter and bestselling author of historical fiction, has
written extensively on creative environments. His theory is, art exists before
it’s created, and it’s propelled into material being by its own imperative to
be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination
and inspiration, whom we call artists:

“Creators operate in a chaotic
universe, and the object is to approach the mystery via order, commitment and
passionate intention. And when we convene day after day in the same space at
the same time, a powerful energy builds up around us. This is the energy of our
intention, of our dedication and of our commitment.”

Proving,
that the circumstance of creative activity, the place where we manufacture our
ideas, is just as important to the process as the ideas themselves. In fact, I’m
not the only person obsessed with personalized workspaces. Throw a rock and
you’ll hit a number of books, art exhibits, documentaries, web shows and
photography collections that offer rare glimpses into the mysterious, private
worlds of artistic work spaces. And what’s fascinating is, all of these
resources point to the same key principles. We quickly learn that the primary
creative environment is a finely calibrated mechanism, tailor made to our
obsessions, compulsions, preferences and idiosyncrasies. 

Joseph
Campbell aptly named this this space our bliss
station. In his legendary public television miniseries on mythology, he
said the following:

“A sacred place is an absolute
necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a
day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t
know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know
what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and
bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative
incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a
sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen. Where is your bliss
station? You have to try to find it. Get a phonograph and put on the music that
you really love, even if it’s corny music that nobody else respects.”

Ultimately,
by constructing this predictable environment, we enable the crucial sense of
ease that frees our minds from squandering valuable attention on nonessential
concerns, leaving us with nothing to do but work.

However,
as any creator will tell you, inspiration comes unannounced. It operates on its
own schedule, and you don’t always have access to your bliss station.

What’s
an artist to do?

Build a
portable creative environment.

I
define this as any alternative workspace that functions as a transportable
lightning rod, tailor made to your artistic tendencies, which enables you to
snap into work mode and make the word flesh. Even if you’re sitting on the
train, even if you only have a few minutes between meetings, even if there’s
not a screen in sight, it gets the job done.

As a
songwriter, I’m partial to the sound recorder on my phone. At night, I lay down
excerpts of new songs I’m working on––a verse here, a chorus there––and them during
the day, I sing to myself on the subway or during my lunch break. This keeps
the rhythm, music and lyrics fresh in my mind, even if I can’t access my
primary instrument, even if I’m miles away from my main songwriting station.

Hugh
Macleod, cartoonist, entrepreneur and bestselling author, published a popular
article about his portable studio. It’s a simple canvas bag with everything he
uses to make his trademark cartoons on the back of business cards: Card holder,
pens, ink, mints, an mp3 player with selected playlists, a sketchbook, xacto
knife, cutting mat and plenty of blank paper.

Macleod
treats his mini studio as his creative cornerstone. It’s where the adventure
starts, he says, and it’s everything he needs to do what he does, wherever and
whenever he finds himself.

That’s
his portable creative environment.

What’s
yours?

Ultimately, whether it’s a primary or a portable creative
environment, the goal is the same, which is to cultivate the optimal conditions to make your creative
process happen.

To find out where you creativity feels at home, and then to go
there everyday. 

Sentences are my spiritual currency. 

Throughout my week, I’m constantly scouring and learning and reading and inhaling and annotating from any number of newspapers, blogs, online publications, books, articles, songs, art pieces, podcasts, eavesdroppings, random conversations and other sources of inspiration.

Turns out, most of these sentences can be organized into about eleven different categories, aka, compartments of life that are meaningful to me. And since I enjoy being a signal tower of things that are interesting, I figured, why not share them on a regular basis?

In the spirit of “learning in public,” I’ve decided to publish a weekly digest of my top findings, along with their respective links or reference points. Sentence junkies of the world unite!

Creativity, Innovation & Art 

“The muse is hammering on a pane of glassing yelling, can you hear me?” from an interview with Steve Pressfield.

Culture, Humanity & Society 

“A large group of people who have gathered for an hour a week can easily deceive themselves into thinking that’s church,” from Two Kinds of New.

Identity, Self & Soul 

“Your greatest currency in this world is your originality,” from Kevin Smith.

Lyrics, Poetry & Passages 

“Faith in the moment as it is presenting itself to me,” from Psych Today.

Meaning, Mystery & Being 

“It makes me happy to see someone biting off such a big piece of the chocolate cake of life,” from a random email.

Media, Technology & Design 

“Media is the fourth branch of government,” from a new book about George Carlin.

Nature, Health & Science 

“Climate change is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction,” from Bill Maher.

People, Relationships & Love 

“Life is a path that is lit only by the light of those I’ve loved,” from Johnny Cash.

Psychology, Thinking & Feeling

“Depression is like having a popcorn kernel lodged in the back of your throat,” from Abby Norman.

Success, Life & Career

“I’m a man who knows exactly what he wants and goes after something far more realistic,” from The Onion.

Work, Business & Organizations

“Your story makes people want to be a part of the love transaction you’re selling,” from Brains on Fire.

See you next week!

In the movieForgetting
Sarah Marshall,a heartbroken songwriter has this idea for a rock opera.
The theme of his musical is vampires and eternal love and how men smother the
women they want to be close with.

And the hook is, the writer has this vision of performing
the opera with puppets.

Throughout the movie, Peter struggles to make progress with
his project. He’s depressed and lovelorn. His creativity gets blocked. He even
feels embarrassed to share his work with anybody.

But just when he starts to lose hope on his rock opera, he
performs one of the songs for his new girlfriend. And she thinks the material
is hysterical.

Smash cut to a sold out theater for the musical’s debut
performance, Peter reflects on his creative process, “I didn’t realize that my
musical was a comedy, but when someone told me that, and it just, like, opened
the whole thing up.”

That’s what’s possible when we work medium agnostic.

This
is a common mantra in the digital, startup and tech world. We’re seeing more
and more companies who aren’t attached to any one particular solution or
idea, rather, they’re fueled by serving the evolving needs of the users in
whatever way works best.

Scott Belsky, founder of the online portfolio
platform, Behance, is famous for his
position on creating medium agnostic. He believes companies should be
constrained by their missions, not the media they work in. And so, at his
organization, everything they do revolves around empowering careers and
organizing the creative world––but pursuing that mission through any medium
possible, whether it’s a blog, paper product, conference, or even an online
network.

During a presentation at a recent design
conference, Belsky said:

“Years
ago, a company would have to define themselves primarily by their medium,
saying they’re a tech company or a company that puts on conferences or a blog.
But in the modern day of cloud servers, open source software and seamless
connection with the masses, it’s easier than ever before to pursue your mission
using many mediums. The cost of execution has gone down drastically, making it
easier for a business to expand outside of the media they’ve established
themselves in.”

Of course, that’s the startup world.

But when it comes to the art world, working
medium agnostic is just as applicable.

Instead of locking our work into a single path, we keep
everything in permanent beta, evaluating new opportunities as they present
themselves, taking into consideration our evolving assets. Instead of limiting ourselves to
one vision of our capabilities, we live larger than our labels, cast a wider
creative net, make use of everything we are and open our work to becoming more
dimensionalized.

Because
it’s not our job to decide what to create, only listen for what wants to be
created.

Last
year, I started writing what I thought was going to be my next musical
album. But when I stepped back and freed my work from that label, I let the
project become what it wanted to become. And eventually, I said to myself, wait
a minute, this isn’t going to be record, this is going to be a documentary
film.

That’s what wanted to be created.

Another
time, I started working on what I thought was going to be my next book.
But when I got frustrated and blocked and bored of the material, I stepped back
to let the project become what it wanted to become. A few days later, I had
lunch with a friend who helped me realize, oh wow, this isn’t going to be a
book, this is going to be a college curriculum.

That’s what wanted to be created.

I’m
reminded of an interview I read with cartoonist Hugh Macleod:

“We try to reverse engineer the
universe from our own ego. Hilarity ensues. A winning approach for me is to
just do my work to the best of my ability, and think of every project as not so
much in terms of the result I want to have, but as an experiment to see if this
works.”

Hugh believes, as I have for many years, that with no labels, there are no limits.
That when we keep the results of our work open ended, we open our work to
becoming more, uncovering new territory for expansion, inviting new dimensions
to our creative life.

In
fact, the word agnostic has a
fascinating history, around which there has been significant debate and
controversy. From an etymology perspective, the word literally means, “without
knowledge.” From a historical perspective, evolutionary biologist Thomas
Henry Huxley was the first to surround the word with religious, metaphysical
and spiritual implications. And from a social and culture perspective, technical
and marketing literature use the word to describe an independence from
parameters.

The point is, all instances of the word agnostic point
to the same basic principles:

Discard
prejudices. Suspend judgment. Empty yourself of expectations. Surrender control.
Say yes to what is. Don’t fall in love with your ideas. Put an end to the habitual
anticipation of outcomes.

Listen to what wants to be created.

That’s the mindset of the prolific creator.

Every creator needs an on ramp.

A ritual that prompts a work mindset, a moment that merges
you into the creative process, an environment that sets a tone that says work happens here, a practice that
ensures cadence and rhythm, and a routine that gets you in the mood, in the
flow and in the zone, so that by the time you actually hit the highway of life,
you’re traveling at the same speed as traffic, and you can navigate the road
effectively.

It’s actually quite scientific.

The brain takes cues from the body.

Whatever on ramp behavior we practice, it activates the
creative subroutine in our head, brings up our energy and snaps us into the
appropriate state of mind to do our work.

That’s why so many artists start every day of their lives in
exactly same way.

Because they don’t want to have to wake up and look for
options of what to do first. That’s a decision-making process that’s exhaustive
and stressful and wastes valuable energy they should be dedicating to making
things.

That’s
why I spend the first half hour of every day inhaling. Promiscuously.

I read and browse and learn from a diverse range of websites,
blogs, pictures, comic strips, trending memes, online publications, interviews,
research studies, books, articles, songs, street art, store signs, podcasts,
eavesdroppings, conversations and other sources of inspiration.

Plus, I take notes. Lots of notes.

And by the
time I’m done making my rounds, my desktop is littered with new documents and
ideas and perspective and insight. I feel engaged with what’s going on in the
world. I view the news as a source of energy, not just a source of information.

And now
I’m ready to go to work.

This
morning practice, this creative subroutine, ensures that the first part
of my day has a cadence and rhythm that includes movement. And by giving my ritual of thinking the
primacy it deserves, never forcing it to compete for my attention with anything
else, I find that I’m able to stay prolific.

What’s your
on ramp?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Plato famously asked this question in The Republic, the translation of which is, who will guard the
guards?

What’s interesting is, we all have our own version of this
question. And for leaders and creators and communicators, the one that weighs
us down is usually, how do I stay
inspired when my job is to inspire others?

You recalibrate the soul. You carve a path back to yourself.

And there are unlimited techniques and practices and rituals
for doing so. The experience of inspiring and reinspiring yourself is based on
each of our unique preferences and passions and predispositions.

I’d like to share a few of my own, in the hopes that they
might inspire yours:

Find and pull your triggers
for joy.

Once upon a time, I used read books just to read
books. But when I became an author, reading turned into work. If a book was
open, I wasn’t just reading the words; I was trying to deconstruct the
architecture and opportunities around them. So I decided to start reading
fiction before bedtime. Mostly dystopian epics and gothic thrillers with female
protagonists. And what I found was, these books transported me to another place
where I didn’t have to work. I could just relax and let the words wash over me.
By doing so daily, it created a space where I don’t feel obligated to do
anything other than just soak it all in.

Do you have a personal haven that gives you sustenance
from the act itself and puts you back together?

Find a filter to process your
experiences.

My yoga
practice isn’t just a great physical workout; it’s also routine of confronting
and working through my emotions. And maybe it’s because the room is a hundred
degrees. Maybe it’s because I’m half naked. Maybe it’s because I’m staring at
myself in the mirror for ninety minutes and I have no choice but to work
through my own issues. But after a few postures, any feelings and emotions and
inner struggles that need to be dealt with, are.

Do you have a familiar
place you go when you’re feeling scared or anxious or confused or overwhelmed
and need to make sense of the world?

Find a way to burn calories instead of
being sad.

I’ve had my bouts with anxiety, stress, unhappiness
and disappointment. Even a few bonafide panic attacks. But the interesting
thing is, every time I get busy burning calories, working hard, moving my
body, making meaning, helping others, taking care of my family, actively
engaging with my community, spending time with friends and working on the
project of building a life, I notice that I no longer have time to be
depressed. Because when we start making meaning instead of monitoring moods, life
gets a lot less depressing and lot more inspiring.

Do you have a highly
human experience, free of the existential torrents of life, which gives you
cognitive richness and psychic nourishment?

Find a way to cocreate.

Historically,
I’ve always worked alone. Mainly because it’s faster, cheaper and I’m a total
control freak who doesn’t play well with others. But after about fifteen years,
it gets hard to be creative alone. Like playing basketball without a backboard. And so recently, I started collaborating
on a creative project with another artist. Turns out, the regularity of human
bonding diversifies your creative reservoir in new and exciting ways that
sitting alone in a living room never could. When you reach out and
cocreate with someone, you’re expanding your brain’s repertoire and getting new
wiring out of it. And that’s
the beauty of collaborative work. It doesn’t
help you find your voice; it helps you lose it. Because whatever you do
together makes the work different.

Do you know
how to discover your own kind and connect with kindred spirits through a shared
culture?

Find
a way to reconnect to your original joy.

I made a name for myself writing books. Ask most of
the people who know me, and that’s what they know me for. But music was always
my first love. My original healer. My earliest container for mystery and
meaning. Since the age of twelve, writing songs was how I metabolized my life.
It was the closest thing to god I ever had. The problem is, once I started
writing books for a living, I became so busy with the profession of writing
that I lost contact with the passion of writing. At the peak of my career, I
was only composing a few songs a year. Not exactly prolific. Eventually, I
reached a point where I had built up too large of a debt to my artist. And I
knew if I didn’t find a way to reconnect to the original joy that made me a
musician in the first place, I was going to regret it. So I vowed never to lose
touch with something I loved so much ever again.

Do you
have a way to keep kindling handy, to keep up your original enthusiasm relive
the impulse that initially fueled your artistic energy reserve?

Find
a sanctuary of aliveness.

A photographer friend of mine once told me that
camera is only a tool, but what’s important is your eyes and what you see in
your head. Ever since he said that, photography has become a key meaning investment for me. The
process of spotting life’s ephemeral moments, sneaking up from behind without a
sound, closing my palms around them like lightning bugs and releasing them back
into the world, brings me mountains of joy. Whenever I feel the well of
inspiration running dry, I take a break from work to go out on a neighborhood photo hunt.

Do you have a sacred practice
in a space of beauty that brings some measure of coherence back to your life?

Find an existential
anchor.

For the
first ten years of my career, meditation was my daily ritual for maintaining calmness
and sanity, managing anxiety and motivating creativity. The practice was
a combination of deep breathing, self-hypnosis, guided imagery and
progressive muscle relaxation. And I either meditated by myself, or went under
through guidance of an audio program my therapist customized. But the
interesting thing was, meditation never gave me more ideas. It did, however,
make the container bigger. Which makes it easier to catch the big fish when
they swim by,

Do you have a
portable, purposeful and private sanctuary that brings you back to center to
reconnect with the self, the body, the spirit and the heart?

Find
a mini sabbatical.

The word sabbatical comes from the term
sabbath, meaning day of rest.
But the idea of a sabbatical dates back to ancient agriculture. Mosaic law
decreed that on the seventh year, a farmer’s land was to remain untilled while
debtors and slaves were to be released. When I first learned about that
etymology, it occurred to me that a sabbatical as exactly what I needed. To
leave the land alone. To emancipate myself as a slave to achievement. And for
someone who’s genetically wired for hard work, the hardest thing to do is
nothing. It’s the opposite of ambition and the antithesis of labor. It’s idleness. Blech. But as my dad used to
say, you have to learn to love what’s good for you. And so, last summer, I
decided to do nothing. For three straight months. And it turns out, for someone
who’s happiest when he’s productive and prolific, for someone who’s wired to
find satisfaction by adding value through toil, taking a sabbatical was the
best thing I could have done. By the time summer was over, I was completely
rejuvenated.

Do you have the
ability to leave the creative land alone by creating mini sabbaticals from your
artistic land alone?

Inspired yet?

If not, your challenge as a leader and a communicator and a creator
is to consider what it will take to recalibrate your soul and carve a path back
to yourself.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

You will.

Being prolific means having an awareness plan.

A metacognitive procedure or mental recipe for perceiving
and thinking about the environment around us. A lens for interacting with the
world. A plugin for the human operating system.

For example:

What if you saw everything as edible? What if you dreamed up
alternative interpretations for the events you noticed? What if you
hypothesized people’s potential relationships with each other? What if you
imagined past and future reincarnations of every object you encountered?

Those are awareness plans.

Psychologist Herbet Leff coined the term in Playful Perception, a quietly published book from the early eighties.

But despite its relative obscurity, a number of renowned
academic publications dubbed his work as groundbreaking research in the field
of cognitive science. In fact, since its original publication date, dozens of
bestselling books on innovation and psychology have touted its validity, citing
his book as a definitive work on the topic.

This book completely changed the way I approach my creative
process. The simple idea of choosing an awareness plan helped me realize that
with the right lens, the right posture and the right filter, inspiration
will actually seek you out.

Take analogous thinking, for example. That’s the process of
transferring ideas from one field of knowledge into another. Like when we were
kids and our teachers gave us quizzes like this:

FORMULA : LABORATORY ::

1. map : wall

2. relaxation : den

3. sunlight : patio

4. recipe : kitchen

The strategy is to ask the question, “What else is like
this? How can I apply the basic concept in front of me some other domain of
life?”

The answer is “d”, in case you were wondering.

Of course, that’s just one example.

Awareness plans come in all shapes and sizes. Analogies work to help inspiration seek me out.

The exciting part is, once you find the awareness plans that
work for you, they become a precursor for prolificacy. They stimulate insight
and curiosity, improve cognitive readiness and psychological openness,
influencing your feelings and views of the world, freeing you from the bonds of
traditional perceptual sets and helping you treat things in life in a constructive
and enlightened fashion.

With a strategy like that, writer’s block will become a
thing of the past.

I once heard a famous comedian reveal that his
secret for writing material was, he didn’t write jokes, he wrote moments.

And
that’s why he’s so prolific.

He works modular.

In his
process, each thought is an uncategorized chunk of creative material. An objective,
portable piece content that accumulates and categorizes into its own structure.
It’s not a bit or a skit or a story or routine, it’s just a moment.

This man is onto something.

Because he knows that all ideas bring with them their own
individuality.

And as creators, we have to respect that. We have to
consciously step back from the work and think, who am I to say what this moment
might become?

Because it’s not our job to decide what to write.

Only to listen to what
wants to be written.

And in the initial stages of the creative process, we owe it
to ourselves to temporarily suspend the need to categorize. To be incrementalists.

Otherwise,
our work falls victim to premature
cognitive commitment.

This is
a term social psychologists use for people become emotionally or
intellectually bound to a course of action. It’s the mindlessness that results
after a single exposure.

For example, if we assign labels to our ideas too early­­––perhaps
that this new piece of writing needs to become a chapter in our next
book––we’ve just prejudged that idea’s quality and value. We’ve forced premature
cognitive commitment. And since we’ve already decided exactly what we’re making,
and our work can only be as good as that.

On the other hand, if we want our creativity to expand into
unexpected territory, to be truly prolific in the things that we made, we have
to keep the process objective for as long as possible.

We have
to work modular.

And
here’s why:

Working modular
detaches from outcomes. Which keeps us focused on the writing process, not
what the writing produces.  It helps us
maintain a casual, relaxed attitude toward our material. 

Working modular objectifies
our creative process. Which creates a sense of detachment and ensures we
don’t fall in love with our ideas. Which opens us to criticism and feedback and
possibility.

Working modular keeps the
creative process open ended. Which allows material to be created within an
unfinished, open loop. Which means we can always go back to add another piece
to make it richer. Because good art is never finished.

Working modular makes
it easy to work on multiple projects simultaneously. Which creates thought
bridges, subconscious connections and integrations between seemingly unrelated
ideas. Which helps us notice natural relationships and structures in our
writings. 

Working modular breeds
consistency. Which helps us execute themes, so we’re less random and our work
is more a representation of our feelings and ideas. By taking a long view
approach to the creative process, we’re less derailed by rejection and more
confident in our work.

Working modular allows
our work to mature. Which allows us to remake our work as we grow and as
the world changes, keeping our creative output in permanent beta, aligning ourselves
with the flow of process and allowing the work to adapt and evolve.

In
fact, when I consider my body of work, I’ve written songs, albums, sermons, cartoons,
stories, books, speeches, articles, blogs, case studies, manifestos, training
modules, thinkmaps, creative briefs, business strategies, affirmations,
meditations, mission statements, personal constitutions, consulting programs,
educational curricula and most recently, a documentary.

But the
thing is, they all started as modules.

That’s why the granular process of adding, organizing, updating,
tweaking and fortifying our creative inventories is so exciting.

Because with every new sentence or note or moment that we write
down, we’re multiplying our intellectual reservoir and creating a constant
surplus position.

And that’s where prolificacy lives.

Sentences are my spiritual currency. 

Throughout my week, I’m constantly scouring and learning and reading and inhaling and annotating from any number of newspapers, blogs, online publications, books, articles, songs, art pieces, podcasts, eavesdroppings, random conversations and other sources of inspiration.

Turns out, most of these sentences can be organized into about eleven different categories, aka, compartments of life that are meaningful to me. And since I enjoy being a signal tower of things that are interesting, I figured, why not share them on a regular basis?

In the spirit of “learning in public,” I’ve decided to publish a weekly digest of my top findings, along with their respective links or reference points. Sentence junkies of the world unite!

Creativity, Innovation & Art 

“Creativity can evolve and endure, even in the sunset of an artistic life,” from painter Ed Clark.

Culture, Humanity & Society 

“If you tell people they’re undeserving and need salvation, you create a market,” from Real Time.

Identity, Self & Soul 

“There are worse ways to be remembered,” from a random conversation.

Lyrics, Poetry & Passages 

“I must beat up the world’s face with my bare knuckles making it a bloody, pulpy mess,” from Her.

Meaning, Mystery & Being 

“Reading a book on mindfulness is a pretty good indicator that you’ve lost yours,” from Chelsea Handler.

Media, Technology & Design 

“If you do make a mistake, it echoes in a digital canyon forever,” from Alec Baldwin.

Nature, Health & Science 

“Science has replaced religion as a source of wonder for many today,” from Pysch Today.

People, Relationships & Love 

“Don’t be afraid to be the one who loves the most,” from Long Lasting Love.

Psychology, Thinking & Feeling

“Attention can be thought of as a clash between an object and its environment,” from Scott Adams.

Success, Life & Career

“Your career is a victory over the self,” from Jerry Seinfeld and Howard Stern.

Work, Business & Organizations

“You catch what’s in the air and read the body language of a place,” from David Rosenblatt.

See you next week!

Life is preaching to us all the time.

And as creators,
people with hypersensitive relationships to the world, we have a responsibility
to make the word become flesh.

Because all we need is one idea, one thought, one image, one
metaphor, one sentence, one poetic turn of a phrase, which we feel deep in
their bones and can’t wait to share with the world, and we’ll make a meal out
of it.

Carlin used to write comedy this way.

He’d begin with a single note.

But over time, his notes would take on a life of their own.
They’d start to find each other and become a family of ideas. And before he
knew it, George would be sitting on sixty minutes of new material for his next
standup special, all of which originated from that first note, that crucial
moment of creative conception, that little piece of kindling that got the fire
going.

And the best part about the process was, once the bonfire
was blazing, nobody even remembered the piece of toilet paper that started it.
Any piece of creation radiates outward and multiples itself until perhaps the
original thing cannot be identified.

Edward DeBono, the godfather of creativity, has published a
substantial amount of research on the process of fully fleshing out your work.
He calls it movement value, which is
the creative habit of recognizing beginnings. Identifying concepts that allow
you to breed other ideas from those concepts, spawning as many creative
offspring as possible.

Debono’s work found that the daily process of making the
word become flesh can actually become a form of muscle memory. In the same way
that a yogi’s hips snap into the downward dog position, the motor task of
documenting meaningful things you notice can eventually become something you
perform without conscious effort.

It just takes practice.

We have to get good at noticing the moment of conception. That
thing when we say to ourselves, hey wait,
I think there’s something there.

And you feel your head and heart begin to make their voice
known, louder and louder, insisting that you give this moment attention, so you
respond by thinking, oh man, something
badly wants to be built here,
something desperately wants to move from word to flesh, so you open your
heart to what wants to be born, follow that vibe and see where it takes you.

Because every moment of conception has an engine, a spark
and an energy source. A pulse that all the other ideas hum with and grow from
and move around and work off of.

And once you spot that moment of conception, the real
discipline is harnessing its energy source to populate all of the implications
and applications and situations and locations and motivations and concepts and patterns
and stories and images and actions and insights and numbers and observations
and decorations and declarations and invitations and questions and
consequences, that are connected to it.

That’s movement value.

It helps you recognizing what you’re handling.