not really sure where this post is going, so here’s to just starting!
one of my favorite inspirational quotes is by ira glass. it’s been made into many videos, posters, etc., but my favorite is this one:
it’s what made me decide to develop my graphic design abilities more consistently. my big takeaway was that the only way to “close the gap” was to do more and more work.
one of the interviewees said that, of course, anybody who has good taste and skills to bring that taste to life is amazing. i think he used the phrase “mega designer.” but that’s not the only pathway out there to being a designer. it’s also possible to have good taste and then be a curator of things in line with your taste.
this allows you to use your curation to solve maybe the same design problems that a mega designer could. some people sketch, refine details and perfect their own ideas; others curate and recreate and produce clever rearrangements of other ideas. there’s space for both types of designer.*
my old colleague, curtis, wrote earlier this year about the different roles of network leadership and curation was one of them. as the world becomes increasingly connected and content-rich, the world will need more and more curators to help people sift and sort through it all. access to things humans have created in the past is increasing and we are creating more and more content every second.
* in fact, some people might even say that there isn’t much of difference between those two types of designer because all creativity is is the recombination of disparate elements to solve a problem in a different context.
in february 2013, one of my best friends (ambroise) and i started a practice we call imagining our futures. every six months, we sit together (in person or virtually) and ask each other where we are now in life and then where we want to be in six months, one year, five years, and ten years. we record it in a running google doc and make sure we don’t look at the last round when doing the current round. at the end of the current round, we look at the previous round.
tbh, i can’t remember exactly what sparked the idea. i know it had something to do with him getting ready to leave academia because he was finishing his masters.
august 2016 was our eighth round of doing the practice. it’s been four years. i’ve learned some pretty surprising things. ambroise may or may not agree with how i verbalize these lessons (so i will try not to speak for his learning here), but most or all of these lessons have come from our collective processing.
the three areas to cover at each time marker are location, romantic relationship, and work. other things can be added, but covering at least those three is key.
the more vague you are with your descriptions of where you are in the future, the easier it is to stay within them.
the more specific we are with our projections, the faster it becomes obvious how quickly what we want changes.
what we want changes WAY more than either of us expected.
it’s much easier to predict where you’ll want to be from some phases of life (graduate school, for example). other phases of life (two years after grad school) are more difficult to predict from.
sometimes, it’s really difficult to say more than “i don’t know” about where you want to be in five or ten years.
doing this over time has made the idea of long-term planning for the future seem absurd. yes, i know the rate of change slows over time, but given that many people in their 20s and 30s are making decisions that will set the course for the rest of their lives, it seems odd (suboptimal) to make those decisions when you’re changing the fastest.
in her interview on on being, elizabeth gilbert shared a theory that really resonated with me. here’s a paraphrase:
“i’m developing a new theory: everything interesting is 90% boring. marriage, raising kids, even doing your dream work… it’s all mostly boring. there are the moments when things are exciting and attention garnering and great. but those moments are few and far between. for the most part, it’s putting in all the unglamorous time and work that makes awesome moments possible.
this reality is a pitfall of people who follow their passions for career. they leave their boring, tedious day job only to realize with a shock that their passion work too is tedious and boring most of the time.”
this makes a shitton of sense to me.
many a friend and acquaintance has mocked me for going to bed so early and getting up early. i often respond with, “hey, boring people get shit done,” and have been doing so for years. i think this is true because boring people understand how to push through the slog to the success point. “boring people” understand that meaningful, important is not all glamour and accolades.
i was even talking to my friend, ross, the other day about my allergy to being everywhere all the time. people who are everywhere all the time can’t possibly have the time to put in the hard work to do anything really meaningful.
anyway, now for some quotes and anecdotes:
“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” — Warren Buffett
ryder carroll, the creator of the now wildly popular bullet journal says he perfected the journal over 20 years before launching the concept officially three years ago. - wall street journal article (ht @rchanowski)
“it takes at least ten years to become an overnight success.”
this post details the three most critical pieces of technology in my personal system. although my system has evolved over time and consists of more protocols than tools, without these tools, i’d be rubble. and by rubble i just mean less productive and more stressed.
the reason i’d be rubble is because of two lessons that’s david allen shared with the world in getting things done.
when you use the wrong tool for the wrong purpose, you become desensitized to it. many people experience this constantly. it’s what happens when you start glazing over tasks on your todo list or start ignoring things on your calendar (more on that below).
allen suggests that the solution to this problem is to use the right tool for the right purpose and only for that purpose. this meant changing a lot of bad habits i’d built up over time, but now that i have, my life will never be the same.
so, here’s the rundown (largely inspired by allen’s writing, but with some evolutions of my own).
tools
your calendar is only for things that need to be done at a certain time; often meetings and certain types of chores.
your calendar is not your todo list.
your email is only for communicating with people
your email is not your to do list.
your to do list is a place (usually consisting of multiple lists) where you are able to store all your tasks, ideally sorted into useful categories. those categories can be by priority (urgency and importance), by location you need to be in to do the task (office, home, summer house), or any other divisions that are meaningful for you.
your to do list is not your calendar.
the reason to have all these tools sorted out as such is that (1) it allows you to know exactly where to go for what activity or information and (2) it saves you time by keeping you focused.
common pitfalls/situations that occur when people misuse one or more of these systems:
going into your email to respond to one thing, snapping back to reality an hour later, and wondering what happened to all your time. this experience is often a symptom of not having a sufficient workflow from your email to your todo list. in my system, when an email takes more than two minutes to answer, it often means i need to get a task onto my todo list and respond to the email later.
you start ignoring things on your calendar. this is usually a symptom of starting to use your calendar as a todo list. as with the other things, the worse case scenario here is that you become so numb to your calendar that it ceases to be a useful tool.
there are specific strategies to avoid these problems, but identifying that you have one or more of these problems is a good start.
one of the latest on being episodes is an interview with elizabeth gilbert. creating came up and she shared an insight that resonates with how i have seen and experienced creativity. rather than creativity being fully mastered by the creator or fully a gift of inspiration, it’s actually probably a mixture of both.
on the one hand, some creators take all the credit for their brilliance. these are the “i worked hard for years and years and that explains my skill and amazingness.” on the other hand are the vessel creatives. their line of thinking is “i’m just a vessel. i wait for inspiration and then i act on it when it comes.”
to gilbert (and me), neither feels totally right. she believes that the world’s best creators inhabit a place in between these two theories. it’s not completely up to you when inspiration comes, but you can prepare and be ready for it when it hits.
this makes a ton of sense to me and lines up with lots of my own experiences. she gives many examples of other artists over history who have verbalized this middle-ground and i’ve heard many as well. basically the trick is show up and work every day so that when a brilliant idea or song or painting or design fix or whatever hits, you have exactly the right tools and processes in place to make it come to life.
and to wrap things up, here are two relevant quotes that i can’t find the sources for, so i’ll just paraphrase for now:
“luck happens to everyone, but some of us are more ready than others to seize and capitalize on it.”
“good things happen to those who work hard.”
ps - i think this is a great piece of good news. this thinking takes being a “creative” out of the realm of exclusivity. everyone already can be (or already is) a creative; we just don’t yet have human systems to recognize and capitalize on that.
pps - i think this thinking has a strong parallel in the free will vs predestination conversation. whether talking philosophy, creativity, or spiritually, i think it’s a both in all these cases. maybe all those sacred texts aren’t divine because they’re literally the word of God, but because they were written by people who were dedicated and wrote down the good stuff when it came through. hm!