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Issue № 80
Hidden gems
Suppose you wanted to be surprised and delighted (and possibly intrigued and befuddled) in some field. You could start with the Top 10. Today, I’m talking about movies, so find some list of the 10 Greatest Films. This sort of listing is ubiquitous: 10 Greatest Dramas, 100 Films preserved by the U.S. Library of Congress,…
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Issue № 79
I accept
I have had the privilege of standing—not in the exact cedars and mountains you’ll discover below—but nonetheless in cedars, in mountains, in northern Japan. It wasn’t a pilgrimage. But it sort of was. It was a long train ride. A very long walk. A very nearly exhausting long ascent. No guide. Just a curiosity. Just…
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Issue № 78
Branded
It’s sublime that the little word “brand,” which we toss about so lightly these days, has definitions that are horrific when juxtaposed: A type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name, and an identifying mark burned on livestock or criminals or slaves with a branding iron. The internet has made it so that no matter who you…
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Issue № 77
Obliged to respond
I recently heard a conversation between Brian Koppelman and Steven Pressfield (circa 2019 in Koppelman’s podcast, The Moment) where Pressfield mentioned a few great things for creatives to remember: Being a professional has nothing to do with getting paid. Resistance is real, it’s myself, and is waiting for me to invite it to stop me. The…
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Issue № 76
Try steeper
“The obstacle is the way” is not a phrase from Art du Déplacement. It’s a two-thousand-year-old comment from a Stoic (writing in a personal journal to himself.) In a similar vein, he also wrote that, “nature turns all things to its own purpose.” Likewise the more modern “Rust never sleeps,” is equally pithy. The real lesson…
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Issue № 75
I am a creative
It’s a good day, any time I can find an excuse to link to A List Apart. This piece doesn’t need an excuse to be linked. Nearly every sentence in it starts with “I am a creative…” and makes it read like some sort of manifesto… or the beginning of a communal incantation at some Creatives…
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Issue № 74
Do not hoard ideas
Holding on to a lot of ideas takes a great deal of time and energy. If, like me, you’re a systems person you can make things much worse. I can build personal knowledge systems, slipboxes, databases, custom software and bend all sorts of technology into new shapes. It turns out—as I hope you’ve already guessed—that if you have too…
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Issue № 73
Why not?
Because it’s crazy. It’s insane. It will never work. You’ll hear this a lot if you have a lot of far-out ideas. “Moonshots” is the term I prefer for such ideas, or a really big swing. And then in an instant he realised that rather than building a cable through the wildernesses of Newfoundland and Nova…
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Issue № 72
148 lines
Preparation—getting everything just so, the right desk, the right software and computer, the right room, the right beverage, the right time, the right mindset—is really simply a form of hiding. Sometimes it’s only a few moments, sometimes it’s days, but I always hide before writing every single one of these blog posts. I definitely don’t…
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Issue № 71
Access, for the win
The Whole Earth Catalog. Now there’s someone who poured their time, energy, money and personal brand of sanity into a project, and it succeeded. Then the Internet came along and supplanted the entire project. Yet for years, access to the Whole Earth Catalog itself has been difficult. 55 years on from the first publication of…