Don’t Give Up On Your Great Work

[If you're reading this via email or RSS, you might need to click through to watch the video.] Great work can be hard, and it’s easy to get to the point where you want to quit. Please don’t. I’ll talk more about it in the video. The book I mentioned was Michael Bungay Stanier’s Do [...]

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The Four Essential Drives That Every Creative Needs

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Cath Duncan from Mine Your Resources and The Bottom-line Bookclub. Creative folks figured out a long time ago that traditional carrot-and-stick motivation and productivity strategies don’t work for us, and the rest of the world is starting to catch on to this truth now, too. In his [...]

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No Productivity System Can Override Your Choices

What lies in our power to do, lies in our power not to do. – Aristotle Andrea left a wonderful comment yesterday on Create, Connect, and Consume, and her point is something I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time. The irony is that it’s about the problem of continual deferment. To make [...]

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The Worst Fisherman That Ever Lived

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Ankesh Kothari. Thomas Alva Edison has been one of the most successful scientists the world has ever seen. He invented the phonograph, the motion picture, and the electric light bulb. In all, Edison has 1,093 US patents under his name. But people observed that as brilliant as [...]

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Should You Be A Tour Guide or An Expedition Leader?

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Cath Duncan from Mine Your Resources and The Bottom-line Bookclub If you’re getting inspired, being productive and creating ideas and things, there’s going to come a time, sooner or later, where you realize that your ideas and things are incredibly powerful change agents, that you have a [...]

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How Being Busy Means Not Being Creative

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Ali Hale from Aliventures. Here’s a word: productive. Here’s another word: busy. All too often, we act as though those two words mean the same thing. But they don’t: being productive doesn’t equal being busy. And the correlation between productive and busy is weak at best: being [...]

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9 Questions to Help You Tame Your Toolbox

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Ken Robert from Mildly Creative. Follow him on Twitter. “A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamt of by its author” Stephen C. Johnson Is your creative toolbox out of control?  Have you been adding so many gadgets and whatzits and gizmos to [...]

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Ask Charlie: How Do You Mindmap and Purge?

Note: “Ask Charlie” is a new category of posts where I answer the questions people send me via email, Twitter, or wherever else we interact. After trying to figure out the best way to get these going and what to name them, I decided to just roll with it the easy way and revise as [...]

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The Key To Consistent Creativity and Productivity

How long can you concentrate and focus on one thing before your energy and attention begins to falter? How long does it take you to engage in a particular thing to make the effort of engagement worth it? The answers to those two questions make up (what I’m calling) your engagement threshold, and figuring out [...]

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