There is a great list of tips how to stay creative on Live On Michigan Ave blog.
My favourite ones are:
1. Make lists
It is great to write down your ideas – lists are just made for it (and mindmaps!).
2. Carry a notebook everywhere
I am a stationary freak and a big fan of Moleskine notepads which are great tools to jot down ideas, sketches etc. Highly recommended.
16. Allow yourself to make mistakes
It is always a part of a creative process – allow yourself to fall because only great things may be invented this way.
19. Get lots of rest
Enough sleep and rest is a must for a mind to come up with creative solutions to problems. Many researches prove that in the very morning after a long healthy sleep we solve difficult situations more easily than in the evening.
20 Take risks
Great inventors are usually perceived as fools in the very beginning. They take risks and go beyond common sense with their actions just to discover new lands.
21. Break the rules
Convention is something that very often guarantees mediocrity – thinking outside the box is about breaking the current rules of thinking.
25. Stop trying to be someone else’s perfect
Focus on who you really are and get the best out of yourself.
26. Got an idea – write it down
It’s easy to forget…
27. Clean your workspace
Minimalizm in your workspace kills the clutter and helps to clean your mind too.
29. Finish something
A lot of stress comes not from being overloaded with tasks but from failing to complete them.
What’s more interesting is that TOFU prepared Motion Graphic to visualize these 29 things.
A story of a guy who wanted to run his business like Zappos or Netflix – getting to cash-flow positive and profitable as quickly as possible with customers in mind while giving a lot to employees. Find out how he overcame obstacles, found his way to plan a day without any meetings scheduled and why he is saying that his move was completely insane.
Your reasons behind the switch
Paul Montwill: What were your main reasons behind the switch? Was it about freedom to work in a family-like company you didn’t have while working in a corporate world?
Michael Fitzpatrick: There were several reasons behind my switch from the warm and cozy blanket (this was before the breakout success of the Snuggie by the way) of a larger corporation to the adventure of starting a new business.
I’ve spent my career building web collaboration products, and had always wanted to be able to work in an environment where all aspects of the company were focused on customer and employee success. For me, the opportunity to start a new business with a focus on making customers successful was really exciting. I also wanted the opportunity to create an environment where we worked hard, but the company invested in its people. ConnectSolutions has very high expectations for delivering innovative work, but we also manage to have a lot of fun along the way. Companies such as Netflix and Zappos are examples of the type of culture I like to shoot for. As an example, everyone here has customer-success metrics as an important component of their overall success, and that ensures that the right decisions are always made for the customer first.
37signals is an iconic web agency that built a world famous project collaboration app called Basecamp and has a great development philosophy described in a Getting Real ebook. They are admired by graphic designers, web developers, freelancers and by many others dealing with online technologies. They share their best practices on Signals vs. Noises blog. They also have a great taste when it comes to graphic design and usability with their minimalistic approach. In their new office in Chicago they proved that stunning work environment is something they have high on their priority list. Have a look and enjoy specious working areas and incredible patterns on their walls. They really pay attention to details!
A quick private call was an escape from a daily routine
I’ve just finished watching a jaw-dropping video of Danny MacAskill doing amazing tricks on his bike. You probably saw something similar many times but this one is absolutely different. Amazing sceneries of Scotland, great soundtrack and unbelievable way Danny “rides” his bike with such lightness and joy. It is another example of passion and patience that give birth to masterpiece. He has been practising street trials for more than 12 years and even had to gave up his job as a mechanic to do it full time.
Join over 9 mln people who watched the following video. Make sure you watch it in HD and be amazed for 7 minutes.
This is a kind of video that makes you smile. It also makes you think that if you want other people to take action you need to prepare a clever message. It needs to be good enough to trigger something in their heads. A few words put in a great way can cause a “WoW effect”. Even somebody begging on a street can stand out and get out of the box.
There are so many blogs about productivity and lifestyle design on the Internet that it is hard to count. Most of them usually follow the same pattern with very similar posts. But there are some of them that really stand out in terms of writing style, topic selection and unique value offered to their readers.
One of them is Abundance Blog by Marelisa Fábrega. She writes great posts with useful tips for everybody interested in personal development. They are pretty long and offer a lot of value. The mission of her writing is to show you how to get the most out of life. She covers topics from creativity, productivity and simplicity.
3 great posts by Marelisa
1. How One Hour a Day Can Change Your Life – many people dream of making a switch from a boring job to start doing the stuff they are passionate about. They often say that because of their daily job they don’t have time to do something on the side. The post shows that one hour a day can be enough to follow our dreams. I love the story of a famous writer John Grisham. It is a must-read piece.
How did Grisham go from being stuck in a job he disliked – and which provided little remuneration in return for his hard work – to getting paid millions to do what he loves? He made the sacrifice of getting up each day at the crack of dawn, heading down to his office, making a pot of strong coffee, and sitting at his desk to work on his writing before his official workday began.
“I have written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side – I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”
If you are a creative person and have difficulty in making money or being motivated by external incentives, read the great post’s conclusion:
In order to enhance your creativity, to prevent being “a puppet of circumstances”, and to live up to your full potential, you need to take your focus away from extrinsic rewards – such as money, prestige, and so on – and, instead, place your focus on intrinsic rewards. That is, your main reason for performing your work should be your enjoyment of the task itself, the feeling of satisfaction you get from being involved in a given project, and the sense of meaning you derive from carrying out your work.
Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of bestselling “Eat, Pray, Love” gave a revealing speech about nurturing creativity. In ancient Greece and ancient Rome people believed that creativity comes from some distant and unknowable source called either a “deamon” or a “genius”. So if somebody didn’t have enough of creativity at the particular moment it wasn’t their fault. It was some external source that decided if the craft was meant to be close to perfection. So it wasn’t a matter of being a genius but having a genius.
In the Renaissance where a human being became a central part of the universe the perception of creativity change dramatically. We started to call people geniuses because of their talents, innovative thinking and visions. So if they failed to deliver great results it was their fault. Divine spirits were no longer to be blamed. It became very difficult for a single person to carry such burden on their shoulders. Probably it was the moment when the fear of failure become a serious issue. People started to have anxieties and commit suicides as they couldn’t get great ideas out of their heads
And now we are back in XXI centuries working on a book, article or a painting . And we start to think about peoples’ expectations. Will they like it? Am I doing well? Will I make it?
Let’s rethink creativity again. I have been experiencing this a lot recently. When great ideas come to me and they are so amazing that they surprise me I am pretty sure that they are not from inside of me. They come from outside. It’s not me to make something up but it is me to open for inspiration that will flow into my head. No need to worry and blame ourselves. It is a brilliant concept as it shows how much we should work on the environment we work in while doing creative stuff and how to prepare our minds, bodies and soul for inspiration that will hit us.
There also might be some other interpretation – great ideas don’t come from outside but from a true internal ME that is much more deeper than our level of thoughts.
Daniel Pink during his TED talk asks indirectly a fundamental question about why business demotivates creative people with externals rewards. Researches that were conducted for many years showed that innovative people rely on intrinsic motivation. By offering them financial bonuses we produce opposite results.
I always knew that internally driven people need to feel they are changing the world around them, that they are focused on growing and creating value as well as giving something to the society. But I never thought that by adding external rewards we are not only helping but even making things work.
Why does it happen so often nowadays in companies and public sector? One of the reasons is that building an exceptional work environment and culture like in Zappos is a hard work and only few can do it. Giving pay rises and bonuses is much easier.
It looks like we still use motivational mechanisms back from industrial age. Daniel Pink speaks out to help us all change the situation.
In order to enhance your creativity, to prevent being “a puppet of circumstances”, and to live up to your full potential, you need to take your focus away from extrinsic rewards – such as money, prestige, and so on – and, instead, place your focus on intrinsic rewards. That is, your main reason for performing your work should be your enjoyment of the task itself, the feeling of satisfaction you get from being involved in a given project, and the sense of meaning you derive from carrying out your work.
I had an occasion to watch a keynote of John Matheny, Senior Vice President Communications & Communities from Yahoo! on this year’s CeBIT in Hannover, Germany. It was part of a Global Conference program. John presented Yahoo! Livestand one of their latest solutions for iPad and Android tables which is a “personalized newsstand”. What it basically do it provides you with personalized news feeds from all around the web in a visually appealing way. It is quite similar to the world class iPad app called Flipboard – the only difference is that Livestand relies more on content providers than on social media sources. Watch the video below.
Although Livestand from Yahoo! looks quite promissing I wasn’t convinced by Matheny’s keynote – he pretended he likes this whole social media concept and that Yahoo! is doing really well with this. He wanted to sound “cool” and “passionate” like Steve Jobs but was far from it. He also read the whole presentation and wasn’t convincing at all – it looked like if it was prepared by someone else and he didn’t even have the time to go through it on a plane to Germany. This just proves why Yahoo is doing so badly with Web 2.0 with over $13.3B spent on acquisitions that pretty much failed.
Paul Montwill specializes in Digital and E-commerce Strategies, Online Marketing and industry analysis. He is an E-commerce Sales Director in one of the European IT companies, a blogger and he offers consultancy.
About | Get in touch!
One of them is Abundance Blog by Marelisa Fábrega. She writes great posts with useful tips for everybody interested in personal development. They are pretty long and offer a lot of value. The mission of her writing is to show you how to get the most out of life. She covers topics from creativity, productivity and simplicity.
