I write about how not to suck at being creative, although there’s an unoriginal surplus of sunglasses in all these pictures.
I would’ve preferred to open the story in medias res of a desperate situation, followed by a vinyl record scratch, a frame freeze, and a voiceover of me saying “Yup, that’s me. You might be wondering how I got here…”.
Unfortunately I have yet to upset a drug cartel or mess something up badly enough to lead into a dramatic climax that could justify the movie trope.
So we’re gonna have to settle with this upcoming picture of ten-year-old me wearing shades and a sombrero.
Coincidentally, it’s an appropriate point of entry for a story about myself. I was about…
Ideas that don’t lose their wings rarely take off.
The hype I felt when I heard the 3D printer had been invented was a mistake. But my brain couldn’t help himself from making a secular leap into a sci-fi future of boundless imagination.
“I can finally print a car and take it to work.”
How long until the hoverboards from Back to the Future 2 start mass production? …
What I learned by being the shadow of someone 4x more gifted than me.
For seven years of formal piano education, I was the untalented shadow of the golden boy, Victor.
He was ten, two years younger than me, four times a better performer. It didn’t help that his name is the Latin for “winner” and mine starts with the big L. He was chubby and short, but with the genetic inheritance of two musician parents. Call it a collab.
Hearing him boast about the grand piano he had in his living room, you would’ve thought he was just a prick.
But as hard as it was for me to admit it, his talent…
Fascinating read. How did I not think that Maslow's pyramid also applied to the workspace? After all, it's a jungle out there.
Great work Mariza!
Forget about “being disruptive” and keep this in mind instead.
I grew up in the 90s, so imagine my disappointment when I found out trading cards and collectibles were not a unique, original trend only we got to enjoy.
A confectionery company was putting Panini NBA cards and Pokemon Tazos to shame almost a century earlier. Their collectibles were way cooler: hand-drawn illustrations predicting what living in the 2000s would be like. Now that is worth a wave of “1900s nostalgia” (if most of the target market weren’t dead, but that’s not the point).
Spoiler alert: None of the illustrations predicted anything correctly. I’ll show you more below: there’s no…
You can’t manage creative work, but you can do this instead.
ShantyTok might sound like your conventional KonMari or Pomodoro technique, but make no mistake: this is a completely different beast.
For starters, it comes from TikTok, the social media that can’t pick a lane: pre-teen dance choreographies, life-threatening challenges — anything can go viral there. Including the forgotten genre of sea shanties, when an ensemble of talented singers spontaneously gathered and sang along. ShantyTok was born.
And isn’t that the seamless, creative flow we are trying to get at when managing our own work?
Except management is not exactly what we should look for — what we really need is…
When long walks and morning pages don’t work, try this.
First, let’s get out of this clickbait alley I’ve cornered myself into.
The pixelated man standing in the collage, pulling off the classic intriguing faraway look of fiction writers, is Vikram Seth. He turned an uninspired 100-page novel into a world-renowned, best-selling behemoth of 1349 pages: A Suitable Boy.
That’s a 1249% increase in creative output — but don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I like to crunch the numbers and go full “day trader” when it comes to creativity, my eight computer screens covered in stock charts and jagged lines with cryptic metrics.
But just this once, it…
If you steal this way we’ll let you keep the loot.
The guys made millions of bucks on it and never said, ‘Thank you,’ never said, ‘Can we pay you some money for it?’
That was said by Randy Wolfe, a guitarist you’ve never heard of, former member of Spirit, a band you didn’t know about, that composed a guitar riff you 100% would recognise.
It was in his song Taurus, a name that won’t ring any bells, because you’ve heard the riff under the credit of a different band, and a different song.
Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven.
And yes, they made millions of bucks on it, never giving credit to Wolfe
Now, if someone has to be deemed the “person most damaged by…
To get out of them, stop following the cow’s path.
In Boston town
of old renown
the gentle cows
the pathways made
Which grew to streets that keep the stranger quite dismayed.
I tip my hat to Boston’s Office of Travel and Tourism; that was a smart move.
Boston’s roads are known for being unnecessarily convoluted and nonsensical. So they stamped that poem into a postcard — “cows made the roads; we just paved over them” — and turned an otherwise topographic inconvenient into a touristic feature.
What’s even more brilliant: that’s a compelling alibi. Cows like to traverse the grass through the same paths, making natural walkways. …
Perhaps I’ve seen a dozen too many David Attenborough documentaries.
Rainforests have an immediately recognizable surface: the vast, majestic blanket of treetops.
But venture below, stare at the inner bio-machinery that runs them so smoothly, and you’ll understand why we have the pressing need of getting Walt Disney out of the freezer to put sir David Attenborough in there instead.
Because one lifetime won’t be enough for him to explain to us every one of the interconnected, complex relationships that power up the ecosystem (and also because I’m too far into my Attenborough fandom to accept a voiceover replacement).
Ideas that stand out work in a similar fashion
From the surface, they are simple and eye-catching; familiar even. But…
Loudt Darrow
I write about how not to suck at being creative.
