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My grandfather has long and prestigious history in the closeout industry. As a discount retail pioneer, he founded his business in the early seventies. Nearly four decades later, his company remains a global leader. Naturally, he’s seen everything, from depressions to recessions to floods to industry shifts to product recalls to lost palettes to technology innovation to stolen trucks to entire ceilings spontaneously collapsing in warehouses. And something he…

The process of fully fleshing our your work hinges upon movement value. It’s the discipline of recognizing conceptual beginnings, witnessing ideas in their nascent state and thinking to ourselves, hey wait, I think there’s something here, and then using that moment of conception to spawn as many creative offspring as possible. Turning a seed into a forest, essentially. This is the crucial process that separates the creatively blocked from…

In the early stages of creation, the goal is to get your ideas to ground zero. To offload all of the raw materials so they can be processed to their rightful inventory location. Cognitively, this closes the open loops in your mind and keeps your brain from nagging and freaking out about losing or forgetting them. But once that phase is done, let the production begin. What’s interesting is, the…

Blank pages are the enemy. If you want to consistent generate compelling content, the trick is to ensure that there’s something going on all the time, not just the moment you sit down and decide to start working. To assure your process of creation isn’t driven and dictated by time pressure alone. To insure that your instrument is finely tuned for the world to move through you. Which means,…

We’ve already established that if you don’t write it down, it never happened. The next secret to becoming a prolific creator is, if you don’t process what you write down, you’ll never make anything happen. After all, what good is a good idea if you can’t find it? Being prolific, then, isn’t just about using your right brain, it’s about using your brain right. I’ve always struggled with this…

Tom Clancy was the bomb. Quite literally, in fact. He wasn’t just the master of espionage and military science; he also knew a thing or two about being prolific. With seventeen bestsellers and more than one hundred million copies of his books in print, he was one of the most successful thriller authors of all time. In the novel Debt of Honor, the main character finds himself at a…

Prolificacy hinges on the power of one. Before she was the creator of the wildly hit show Girls, Lena Dunham made her first feature film, Tiny Furniture. The movie was created on a shoestring budget with mostly friends and family members, shot in Dunham’s own apartment. And while some critics said the film lacked substance and that the characters were unlikeable, the movie still won an award at a…

Sundance knew he shot better when he moved. When he applied for the job as the payroll guard, the crotchety old miner told him to hit the tobacco plug, but with no fancy footwork and no quick draw theatrics.I just need to see if you can shoot the damn thing, he says. He stands there, aims, shoots and misses by by a yard. But right when the old man…

Our greatest currency in this world is our originality. And yet, it’s also our greatest burden. Because the interminable pressure to create and produce and constantly crank out new material, day after day, without being derivative or repetitive or stale, can overwhelm even the most prolific creator. That’s why we need a system. And we’ve already explored the metacognitive level, through the power of awareness plans as a plugin…

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…