“Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.”
– Osho
Creativity
The End Goal
“The goal isn’t credit. The goal is change.”
– Seth Godin
How To Email Busy People
“If you want a meeting, ask for a meeting. Provide some time options and ask for a specified length. If you want an introduction, ask for an introduction. If you’re looking for funding, tell him you’re currently fundraising and ask to meet to show him your pitch. Don’t be sly. Don’t hint. Make the process ridiculously easy by just asking for what you want.”
How to email busy people, by Jason Freedman
Collateral Damage
“Sometimes we are just the collateral damage in someone else’s war against themselves.”
– Lauren Eden
Future of Content
“The future of content, in my opinion, is all about creating context. We are bombarded with so much information from so many channels every single day, that people crave editorial that can actually help them make sense of everything. We get so much of our “content” in these little bursts now — be it an email, a tweet, a blog post. But it’s always this little bite-sized, isolated bit of information. We rarely understand how it actually fits into our lives.
Given this, I think what’s needed are curators, editors, writers, filmmakers, etc who can really zoom out from that narrow perspective and take the long view. Who can do some of that sense-making for people so that they understand how this political development fits into the long arc of history, or how developing this particular habit will give their life more meaning in the long run. The future of content is about creating a rich, well-thought-out context that makes it possible for people to really process and synthesize ideas in depth — not in this surface-y way we’re all accustomed to now.”
– Jocelyn K. Glei
This interview with my friend Jocelyn really made me think.
Honesty
“Honesty always gets my attention. Not particularly someone who is honest to me, but someone who is honest with themselves.”
– Heath Ledger
(via Nitch)
Ideas You Consume
“What you think is a function of the ideas you consume.”
– Faris
Excellent read: How to balance your media diet.
The Love You Put Into Something
“I strongly believe that the amount of love and care you put into a project is always apparent. Even if people are not conscious of it, they can sense when you have paid attention to every little detail.”
– Jocelyn K. Glei
I wholeheartedly agree with Jocelyn. Read the full interview.
The World
“The world needs the sense that we are all in it TOGETHER!”
– Jean Houston
Every Opportunity Comes with a Cost
“As much as we’d like to be nice people, we owe others a lot less of our time than we believe we do. It’s your business, you’re allowed to be a little selfish with it, especially when the net result of saying “yes” to everything to be “nice” is that you have less time to actually spend on your business and serving your customers.”
– Paul Jarvis
(via my favorite newsletter)
Experience Without Fighting
“Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting.”
― Jack Kornfield
Life
“Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.”
– Stephen Hawking
Grace Bonney on The Art of Thoughtful Emails
“It’s important to own your content in the sense that you take responsibility for it. I’m proud of most of what we produce at Design*Sponge, but I’ve made a lot of publishing mistakes over the years. And owning those mistakes and talking about them publicly (and hopefully helping others avoid those pitfalls or mistakes) is a part of that accountability and trust you have to build with your audience. So I want to make sure that I can go to bed at night knowing I did my best to protect and celebrate the people we’re writing about and that when that goes wrong, I take responsibility and people reading know that we care and are doing our best.”
Taken from Grace Bonney’s interview on The Art of Thoughtful Emails and Clear Communication in Collaboration, part of CreativeMornings’ and WordPress.com’s #OwnYourContent campaign.
Previous articles: John Maeda & Kat Holmes on Designing for Inclusiveness and Ryan Merkley on Licensing Creative Work and How Attribution is Gratitude.
The Cosmic Banana Peel
“Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware. The cosmic banana peel is suddenly going to appear underfoot to make sure you don’t take it all too seriously, that you don’t fill up on junk food.”
– Anne Lamott
(via)
The Point is to Run
“In a long distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out where to put the tired, figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he’s tired. Everyone is. That’s not the point. The point is to run.”
– Seth Godin
(via Emerline)
Living not Coping
“It is not lies or a lack of loyalty that ends a relationship. It is the agonizing truth that one person feels in their heart on a daily basis. It is realizing that you are coping and not living. It is the false belief that there is a verse, quote, phrase or talk that will magically make you feel content, complete or not care. However, it doesn’t last longer than a few days, before your mind and heart goes back to what it wants. It is the moment you realize that you left without ever leaving. It is the moment you realize that fear, shame or guilt is the only thing standing in the way of the life God meant for you to live.”
― Shannon L. Alder
Stay Awake
“Here is the hardest thing for many people about adulthood: Staying awake. That is, resisting the somnambulance that will grow like weeds over any state of habitual life, excepting acute crises. You have to actively invite experiences into your life that will interrupt the smallness of your story and the calcifying generalizations you make about the world based on your own private universe.”
The People You Spend Time With
“The people you spend time with literally co-create who you are, down to the near-cellular level. You’re building a life. The ones you build it with will be critical to your professional success, not because they’ll be in your field, but because they’ll be in your corner. The good ones will give you a kind of emotional buoyancy and a head-shrinking perspective that will nourish the person you’re trying to become—and yeah, that’ll enhance your job performance immeasurably.”
Afraid To Speak
“When I am afraid to speak is when I speak.
That is when it is most important.”
― Nayyirah Waheed
Community
“Communities are not built of friends, or of groups with similar styles and tastes, or even of people who like and understand each other. They are built of people who feel they are part of something that is bigger than themselves: a shared goal or enterprise, like righting a wrong, or building a road, or raising children, or living honorably, or worshipping a god. To build community requires only the ability to see value in others, to look at them and see a potential partner in one’s enterprise.”
– Suzanne Goldsmith
Remember
“No is a complete sentence.”
What I Will Be
“I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.”
– Albert Einstein