Brainstorm

A Couple of Ways To Shift Perspective

[If you're reading this via email or RSS, you might need to click through to view the video.] One of the things that trips a lot of folks up is shifting perspective from tasks, to projects, to objectives. All too often, we’re focusing on details when we should be focusing on the big picture, or, [...]

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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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How to Mind Map Your Way Through Stuckness

Mind maps are a great tool for creative people, in that they are a very quick, natural way for us to get whatever is in our head out of there and on paper where we can see it. But I’ve recently learned of a powerful way to increase the value of my mind maps: I [...]

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Do You Have an Idea Garden?

Where do you plant your idea seeds? How do you give those idea seeds the love and attention they need to become your next great idea? From my experience, most people have the hardest time at the incubation step in the creative process. We all have good ideas, but some of us don’t do a [...]

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Demystifying the Creative Process

“I’m not creative.” “I wish I could be more creative, but I don’t have it in me.” “Why are some people creative and others aren’t?” If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard those statements or questions… The truth is almost everyone has creative potential. What separates good creatives (or dormant creatives that [...]

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Why Productivity is Bunk

Productivity gets a bad rap these days. A few people I respect and am inspired by have gone as far as to say (pretty much) “I don’t give a rat’s ass about productivity, and neither does anyone else who’s worth talking about.” All of a sudden, productivity is chopped liver. Why is this?

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More Free Planners: The Blog Post Planner and Calendar

Edit: I keep the updated copies of these planners on the Free Planners page. You’ll want to grab them there if you’d like to use them.] One of the great things about blogs is that some of the best posts come from the spur of the moment. An intense idea hits you and you crank [...]

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Time to Write: Why You Should Be Unreasonable

Jurgen at Time to Write has written a brief review of Paul Lemberg’s Be Unreasonable that can be found here. Something he wrote really stood out to me: While people believe that systems are the death knell for creativity, the opposite is true. Systemized companies standardize the routine, relieving people’s minds of trying to figure [...]

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