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Shoot Your Arrow of Creative Productivity With Grace

ByJeffrey Davis

The economy’s in flux. Lightning-speed changes in technology dizzy you. And yet your mind teems with ideas. And yet you want, want, want to sustain your creative productivity. But you and I know the problems.

You lose your focus.
Your time slips away.
Your vision fades into a packed scheduler. Your confidence dissolves into a pool of “I’m a fraud and a fool!”-ness.

How can you keep up with let alone innovate in your field?

Imagine your creative momentum like an arrow. What keeps it suspended in air and on-target? What makes the shooting and executing feel effortless?

10 Tracking Wonder Book Gift Ideas for the Well-Rounded Creative
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10 Tracking Wonder Book Gift Ideas for the Well-Rounded Creative

ByJeffrey Davis

Hard-pressed to find that special book for the well-rounded creative, that brilliant wonder tracker? 2011 produced several options for bookish gift ideas. From Patti Smith to social media, from gryphons to visual communicado, my Tracking Wonder Book List really does include something for every well-rounded creative in your life.

Change Your Creative Thinking Through the Body
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Change Your Creative Thinking Through the Body

ByJeffrey Davis

ou want to change your creative mind. More focus. More fire. More flexibility and creative thinking. More time. More creativity and less reactivity. But every time you try to change, you revert back to old habits? So how do you change? How do you get “to the bottom of things”?

A Freudian lens might say, “Go within to figure out why you can’t change. Plunge into your psyche’s depths to find the root cause and story.” A New Age lens might say, “Just imagine yourself changed, and soon you’ll attract everything to change you.” Or another soft lens might simply say, “You’re good enough. Stop trying to change yourself.” All three fall short. Scientists and sages alike show it so.

Maybe the way to change is more physical and less mystical than we care to hear.

The training I’ve developed for a select group gets to the core – without the Freudian stories or mystical wishful thinking.

Stupidity Rules for Creative Professionals
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Stupidity Rules for Creative Professionals

ByJeffrey Davis

I’m having trouble being stupid. Productively stupid, that is. I have infinite reserves of unproductive stupidity – ignoring my car’s oil light, losing my wallet, hiring the wrong person. That’s the variety of a presidential candidate forgetting during a national debate which federal agencies he wants to eliminate (“Oops”). Productive stupidity is something else. Productive…

The Tao of Authentic Marketing for Creatives: A Roundabout Guide
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The Tao of Authentic Marketing for Creatives: A Roundabout Guide

ByJeffrey Davis

1. A “media expert” said a few things yesterday that got me questioning. “Our attentions spans are shrinking,” she said, “So we need to speak in sound bites so we can speak directly to what people need. If you can speak in sound bites, then you will stand out above everyone else.” The implication was…

Open & Nourish Your Mystery Box – Only 5 Spots Left
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Open & Nourish Your Mystery Box – Only 5 Spots Left

ByJeffrey Davis

When I was a tow-headed boy, The Box in the Woods down the road kept my secrets. In the middle of The Woods towered a maple, an “X” carved with a butter knife in its bark. With no other kids in sight, I’d scatter the leaf shards, dig a few inches of dirt with the…

Should You Court Metaphor or Courage to Write Your Story?
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Should You Court Metaphor or Courage to Write Your Story?

ByJeffrey Davis

A few months after Carol Sanford’s son Kirk died prematurely, as a writer she didn’t square off with or mine her heart, per se. She turned to her son’s astronomy notebooks. And then she felt her way into metaphor and form. The result, “Astronomy 111: Grief and Memory,” offers an exceptional reading experience that essays…

Story-telling, Truth, & Cold Blood: Archived Interview w/Moneyball Director Bennet Miller
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Story-telling, Truth, & Cold Blood: Archived Interview w/Moneyball Director Bennet Miller

ByJeffrey Davis

In February 2006 – weeks following the Oscar-winning Capote’s release and just weeks before the Oscars were announced  –  I had the good fortune to interview the film’s director Bennet Miller about the boundaries between truth and fiction in both documentaries and features and even about the boyhood roots for telling stories via camera. Miller’s…

Where Creatives Find Know-How, Community, & Affirmation
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Where Creatives Find Know-How, Community, & Affirmation

ByJeffrey Davis

This morning in a courtyard in Taos, New Mexico, I guided fifteen writers through a meditative yoga flow. When I asked them to check in with questions such as, “What am I here for?” and “What am I writing for?” a couple of them had watery eyes. This group makes up 15 of about 180…

You Want to Have a Remarkable Voice? Listen.
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You Want to Have a Remarkable Voice? Listen.

ByJeffrey Davis

Note: We’re hungry to master our craft. At least judging from the questions readers and clients have sent me, we are. And judging from the research about what motivates us, we are. The following is the third in a series of articles about mastering that slippery thing called “voice.”  Have fun. * * * Part…