Tuesday 31 December 2013
Monday 30 December 2013
Sunday 29 December 2013
Saturday 28 December 2013
Friday 27 December 2013
Thursday 26 December 2013
Wednesday 25 December 2013
Tuesday 24 December 2013
Monday 23 December 2013
Sunday 22 December 2013
Friday 20 December 2013
Thursday 19 December 2013
Wednesday 18 December 2013
Austin Kleon: Keep Your Day Job
Artist and poet Austin Kleon (whose best-selling book Steal Like an Artist continues to inspire) explains why you should keep your less-than creative day job, and how to do it while pursuing your art on the side. Kleon writes:
“You have to pay the bills and feed the mouths, and you do it however you can…And my experience has been that economic security has always helped my art along more than any kind of ‘spiritual’ freedom or whatever…You always have a day job. Just hang in there. This is what I recommend: get up early. Get up early and work for two hours on the thing you really care about. Then, when you’re done, go to your job. When you get there, your boss can’t take the thing you really care about away from you, because you already did it. And you know you’ll get to do it tomorrow morning, as long as you make it through today.”
Read Kleon’s full explanation on how dull day jobs can actually help creativity thrive here.
Relevant: Cal Newport’s chapter in Maximize Your Potential, “Cultivating Your Craft Before Your Passion.”
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/E1YeABScjDM/austin-kleon-keep-your-day-job
Tuesday 17 December 2013
Stop Being Crazy-Busy, You’re Stressing Everyone Out
Every office has a person racing from desk to desk, talking loud and fast, checking and replying on their mobile; always on the go. They look important, they feel important, but actually, they are stressing out of their coworkers. As the Wall Street Journal explains:
Ray Hollinger was known for years among colleagues in a previous job as a sales-training executive as “Mr. Busy,” he says. In his quest to be a top performer, he says, he often thought, “If all this stuff just keeps coming at me, I will take it on. I will take it all on,” says Mr. Hollinger, founder of More Time More Sales, a Phoenixville, Pa., training firm.
He says he wasn’t aware that his constant motion sometimes made others feel uncomfortable—until a co-worker pointed it out. She told him that when she tried to talk with him, ” ‘your volume goes up, your pace of speaking goes up, and you’re not fully in the conversation,’ ” he says.
It’s even worse in open offices.
When the boss has a view of the entire office, “no one wants to be seen as the slowest moving object in the solar system. You have to keep up with the Joneses—literally,” says Ben Jacobson, co-founder of Conifer Research, Chicago, which conducts behavioral and cultural research for companies.
Read the rest, and how to fix it, here.
Related: Tony Schwartz: The Myths of the Creative Overworked
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/FbR_rbGcmig/stop-being-crazy-busy-youre-stressing-everyone-out
Monday 16 December 2013
Sunday 15 December 2013
Saturday 14 December 2013
Friday 13 December 2013
Thursday 12 December 2013
Wednesday 11 December 2013
Tuesday 10 December 2013
Monday 9 December 2013
Sunday 8 December 2013
Saturday 7 December 2013
Friday 6 December 2013
Thursday 5 December 2013
Wednesday 4 December 2013
Tuesday 3 December 2013
How Elon Musk Thinks: The First Principles Method
We normally think by analogy — by comparing experiences and ideas to what we already know— but Musk says there’s a better way to innovate. From an interview with Kevin Rose:
“I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.”
The benefit of “first principles” thinking? It allows you to innovate in clear leaps, rather than building small improvements onto something that already exists. Musk gives an example of the first automobile. While everyone else was trying to improve horse-drawn carriages, someone looked at the fundamentals of transportation and the combustion engine in order to create a car.
Naturally Musk does give one warning about using first principles for innovating however, “it takes a lot more mental energy.” Watch the entire interview below:
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/g8p5hFvazgM/how-elon-musk-thinks-the-first-principles-method