Articles

Things We Loved: Thanksgiving Edition

Inspiration

Happy Thanksgiving! (To our friends outside the US, happy Thursday!) Wherever you may be, we hope you’re experiencing a week filled creative insights.

To add to your Stimuli Queue, we’ve collected a series of articles and videos that inspired us this week. The full list is below, or you can head over to preview the weekly stack in Delicious. If you come across an article during the week you think we should include, share the link with us on our Facebook page or tweet it to us!

Five Things We Loved

5. Let’s kick things off this week by asking where the pardoned Thanksgiving turkeys are now. McSweeney’s has the answer and it’s not pretty. Why do we eat turkey on Thanksgiving anyway? Thankfully, questions like that keep the Mental_Floss editors up at night.

4. Brain Pickings shares two book reviews we think you’ll find inspiring: Robert Levine’s Free Ride, which takes a deep look at over-aggregation on the web; and PANTONE: A Color History of the 20th Century.

3. Yes, there’s an app for that—whatever your ‘that’ is—but is it really necessary? Boagworld offers some advice on whether or not you need an app.

2. We face pressures on a daily basis, some external and some internal. Seth Godin offers advice on handling the pressure from others to work for free. The 99% tells us why grit—our ability to keep pushing toward our long-term goals—matters more than talent.

1. To sing or not to sing? Finally, we bring you two videos that highlight the joys of unnecessary creating: a high school girl has to memorize Hamlet’s “To be or not be,” so she sets it to music; and a frustrated writer escapes his troubles by learning to make things with his hands. What began as a hobby turns into an obsession, and finally, a career making knives for the chefs of New York.

For more shared links throughout the week, follow AC on Twitter.

Tags: articles, Creative Process, inspiration, stimuli, Stimulus, study

AC Podcast: Get Over Yourself & Do Your Work

The Accidental Creative

Here are five questions that can help you overcome blocks and personal barriers and help you do your best work today.

Podcast: Download

Tags: creative block, Focus, Productivity

How Competition Can Foster Creative Growth

Teams

Have you ever played a competitive game against someone? A sport or a board game? It brings out your best effort. In a similar way, you can leverage the power of competition to help you gain new insights, develop new skills, and grow as a creative.

In chapter five of The Accidental Creative, I described a practice I’ve used for years called head-to-heads. It’s a meet-up between two people that’s designed to share insights, stimulate new thoughts and provoke good conversation. The discussion can be on any topic – such as books you’re reading, a conference or seminar you attended, or something you’ve been working on that you’d like to share – but the main goal is to “out share” the other person and provide the most value to the conversation. (Think of it as a two person Ignite event.) Head-to-heads are an invaluable tool for personal growth. (more…)

Tags: head-to-heads, Relationships, The Accidental Creative

Re-Factoring: A Smart Way to Refine and Conquer Whitespace

Productivity

Whitespace, the empty space at the beginning of a project, is blank and barren. It possess no borders. Left unchecked, such a shapeless environment can be disorienting. It’s a total whiteout for your mind.

Fortunately, this very feature of whitespace yields a massive clue to how and conquer it: re-factor it into a unit with borders.

Think of it like a puzzle. A puzzle can have 10 pieces or a million, but they all have borders. Smart puzzle masters start conquering a puzzle by structuring the border. They work from the outside in. Why is this helpful? Because it quarantines off a manageable piece of the whitespace universe. Then, within that defined space, you can begin to carve out your focused idea.

Let’s explore how you might proceed from the edges on in.
(more…)

Tags: Accidental Creative, Focus, specialization, Todd Henry

Turning Time Sinks Into Time Warps

Productivity

Turn time wasters into time warps

Have you ever reached the end of your day and found that your biggest priorities were largely untouched? How can it be that no matter how many lists we make and how many times we review our priorities, time continues to slip through our hands? Often the source of these time sinks is a lack of diligence at a few critical moments throughout the day. These “Time Sinks” can cause us to lose heart, feel lazy and generally lose our productive momentum.

Contrary to popular belief, all time is not created equal. A moment can seem like an hour, and an hour can be fleeting. By turning these Time Sinks into Time Warp moments, we can set ourselves up for greater daily productivity. (more…)

Tags: Focus, Time, time management

Things We Loved

Loved

New to AC, and starting today, we will be bring you links to fill your stimulus queue that have inspired or provoked us. We wanted to share the wealth (so-to-speak) with you!

This Stimuli list will come to you each Thursday via AC. (To make sure you never miss one, please subscribe to AC by email or RSS.)

If you wish to get a bit geeky with us, then you can preview all of these links in Delicious. (This is where we will continue to add stimuli links each week.)

Five Things We Loved

1. TED Talks labels this speech as jaw-dropping, and we agree. Thomas Suarez talks to TEDx ManhattanBeach about app development. The jaw-dropping part? He’s 12-years-old.

2. From the Harvard Business Review, why you need to understand the box before you can think outside of it.

3. Brain Pickings is one of our favorite sources of “wow”. Check out this article on The Universal Traveler and a unique approach to the creative process.

4. The Letters of Note blog is a constant source of inspiration. From the blog, one office that fosters creativity (“PERSIST on staying true to your vision”) and one that decidedly did not (“Supervision of you will be more strict now than ever”).

5. Santa now takes credit cards, thanks to Square! The Salvation Army bell ringers will be equipped to accept mobile payments.