Creativity

To be a successful creator, you don’t need to wait for inspiration to strike. You don’t need to wait for the muse or to wait for an original idea. You don’t need “hacks” or to follow the teachings of the latest productivity guru. To be the kind of writer, photographer, musician, artist, or creator who builds a body of work, you only need one thing: a creative project. A creative project is an idea, a proposal to engage in some hypothetical and unrealized creative undertaking....

I am starting to “work with the garage door open.” Robin Sloan coined the phrase in an article discussing/dreaming up new ways of working, networking, publishing, creating, and connecting online. These “new ways of relating” are less reliant on the social networks we’ve become accustomed to over the last decade or two. About working with the garage door open, Sloan wrote: This isn’t a time for “products”, or product launches. It’s not a time to toil in secret for a year and then reveal what you’d made with a shiny landing page....

Drifters, Before I went to Bolivia last August to work on a few creative projects, I stapled two sheets of paper to my Field Notes journal. On them I wrote two lists: a list of “rules” that I imposed on myself during the trip and a list of “aims” to remind me of my goals. Each morning and night, I consulted these lists as a way to stay focused on my work and evaluate how well I had been doing....