Note: Several writers, bloggers, and web-preneurs ask me questions about “finding their voice.” I suggest you won’t find it. You’ll craft it. And you’ll craft it by studying your medium. Your medium is not the web. That’s the vehicle. Your medium is language. I’m also glad to see some discussion about bloggers wanting to be…
No doubt innovative solutions often burst out of two or more creatives’ rapping, dancing, and collaborating together. Steven Johnson makes the case in Where Good Ideas Come From. Social psychologists make the case. Joshua Wolf Shenk makes the case in a series on creative pairs at Slate.com and in a forthcoming book. But in our…
Mabel Dodge knew something about putting talented, engaging people from different backgrounds and creative media in the same room. With the right atmosphere and combination of people, ideas could ignite that might inspire creative action (including, yes, a few love affairs). This New York socialite left the Manhattan glitter in the 1920s for the stark…
What will President Obama say this week when he highlights education reform at the State of the Union Address? If he wants to speak beyond platitudes and programs, then I have six big ideas. Call them the MAKE WONDER FIRST IN THE CLASSROOM PROJECT.
The questions still come up among the writers, designers, and entrepreneurs I work with: Is the muse out there somewhere or within? Doesn’t the very idea of the “muse” imply I’m at the whim of something else? Two clients last week in two separate meetings raised, in essence, these very questions, so we need to…
Do you find anything unusual about this photograph? It appeared in David Segal’s excellent recent New York Times Magazine’s article on how creativity thought leaders are changing the way creativity happens in corporations. The article features Dev Petnaik’s innovative team of creativity consultants, Jump Associates. This photograph shows the team performing yogic stretches before their…
Note: In Part 1 of this series, “Goals for No-Goals Creatives,” I noted how I rarely consciously set goals despite my three businesses’ growth. In that article, I offered, though, authentic ways to approach goal-setting. This follow-up article lays out a more intuitive skillful means that has guided my adult life – imagination. I risk…
Maxine Kumin wrote an ode to excrement. She was not being cute. This farmer-poet is among many artists who challenge conventional notions of what is beautiful, superior, and sacred. The publishers at YogaModern.com asked me to respond to their December theme of “the sacred.” I appreciate our sensibility for the sacred, but our constructions of…
Last month, I posted several pieces related to gratitude and praise. At the bottom of the post I’ve included a Best of list that includes some others’ ideas on gratitude, too. As we head toward the end of the year, I thought it would be insightful to have a round table on gratitude. Today I…
Wonder is pervasive yet evasive. This point became remarkably clear again when some 3,000 bloggers responded to the prompt I offered for Gwen Bell and her team’s sensational Reverb10 Project: Wonder. How have you cultivated a sense of wonder in your life this year? According to the posts, wonder filled many bloggers’ year. Others bemoaned…
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