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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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Timing isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. And the great creative discipline is simply knowing what season it is. And that means much more than the changing of the leaves or the melting of the snow or setting your clocks back an hour. The word “season” actually comes from the French saison, which means, “the right moment, the appropriate time.” And our job as communicators, people whose work involves creating…

The flow of creativity is the constant. The feelings of the creator are the variable.                                                    And if you seek to consistently generate compelling messages and work on a prolific scale as a communicator, you need better constants. Muscles to count on, places to return to, rituals to abide by, people to confide in, rocks to anchor to, practices to rely on, structures to lean against, these routines become the…