The Two Most Overlooked Aspects To Creating A Lasting Early Morning Routine. I love my early morning routine.
I’m always making adjustments to it, and at its core it revolves around waking up early (before sunrise), working on something important for 90 minutes, and then hitting the gym. I recently shared my most recent routine in a blog post about creating new habits. These two aspects have enabled me to create a morning routine that has lasted several months, and it’s through my morning routine truly becoming habitual that I’ve seen massive benefits.
6 Changes That Will Make You More Imaginative. Originality is fundamental to innovation and the key to building sustainable businesses and brands.
However, in order to innovate, we must move from the known to the unknown—we must dream. Sadly, the metaskill of dreaming is not taught in business schools—or any other school for that matter. There is no "Dreaming 101" class. This is disheartening, especially in an age when innovation is often the dividing line between success and failure. The Remarkable Power Of Visual Metaphors To Make Us More Creative. We think of metaphors as the result of creativity.
We assume Macbeth said, "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage," after Shakespeare got his genius juices flowing. But metaphors can be engines of creativity, too. Show people an illuminated light bulb, as a group of scientists did a few years back, and they score higher on certain insight problems. The figurative face of bright ideas produces literal ones. The most robust recent evidence for the power of metaphors to jump start creativity came from a widely celebrated study published in Psychological Science in 2012. New research, published this month in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, suggests that visual metaphors don't have to be so intrusive to be effective. Musical Creativity and the Brain. Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation. 4 Things We Have Wrong About Creativity. “Creativity” may not be the first word that comes to mind when you hear the word “conglomerate.”
How Etsy's Creative Director Uses Intricate To-Do Lists To Free Up Big-Idea Brain Space. "You could use a pad of paper if you wanted to, although that would be kind of crazy," Randy Hunt, the creative director of Etsy, says of his intricate list-making routine.
See, one of the main tenets of Hunt's method involves keeping a never-ending to-do list that includes his whole world of things that need to get done, from work to personal and grand to mundane. "I put literally everything in there: taking out the garbage, walking my dogs," explained Hunt, who also includes "bucket list items" like "meet Noam Chomsky" and "get invited to the White House," on his list too.
Not even the most organized could keep track of an entire life's worth of chores by hand. That's where Omnifocus comes in. The software organizes responsibilities into an inbox, accessible via iPhone, iPad, or on his desktop. Cómo añadir un hiperenlace en Illustrator. 10 Steps To Stealing Your Way To Creative Success. If you’ve got a creative block, the vast and wild frontier that is the Internet is both a blessing and a curse: Though there’s bound to be something in your infinite scrolling that will spark an idea for a new project, there’s also the overwhelming sense that everything--every single possible thing--has been done before.
Writer and artist Austin Kleon starts out his new book, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative, by admitting that yes, it’s true--nothing is original. Accepting that fact, however, is actually one of the first steps to greatness. “If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running from it,” he writes, arguing that the idols and ideas you choose to surround yourself with only serve to make your projects more robust. Co.Design: There is a big market for creative encouragement. Want To Stay Productive? Turn Down The Next Award You Win. The Fields Medal is the thing you want if you're a mathematician with ambition: It's on the prestige level of the Nobel Prize, it's only given out every four years, and you can only win it if you're under 40.
As researchers George J. From OM To OMG: Science, Your Brain, And The Productive Powers Of Meditation. Ever since my dad tried to convince me to meditate when I was about 12, I’ve been fairly skeptical of this practice.
It always seemed to be so vague and hard to understand that I just decided it wasn’t for me. More recently, I’ve actually found how simple (not easy, but simple) meditation can be and what a huge benefit it can have for my day-to-day happiness. As an adult, I first started my meditation practice with just two minutes a day. Two minutes! I got that idea from Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog, where he points out how starting with a tiny habit is the first step to consistently achieving it. How Insufficient Sleep Makes You Fat, Stupid, And Dead. Need a reason to #unplug?
How To Find Inspiration In The Age Of Information Overload ⚙ Co. I recently came across a quote from spoken word poet Phil Kaye’s Repetition.
Why We're More Creative When We’re Tired, And 9 Other Surprising Things About How Brains Work. Editor's Note: This is one of the most-read leadership articles of 2013. Click here to see the full list. Want to be More Creative? Start Keeping More Boring Hours. Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote that her "candle burns at both ends," epitomized the image of the insomniac artist: a person so consumed with the creative act that she couldn’t be bothered to sleep. No wonder Millay’s friend Dorothy Thompson called her "a whimsical genius, sometimes . . . petulant and imperious . . . sometimes stormy, turbulent, and as unreckonable as the sea. " The more overtired we are, the more irritable. Of course, we forgive our artists their petulance and turbulence.
It’s no fun to think of Shakespeare or Picasso or even Steve Jobs at their desks from 9 to 5 with a one-hour break for lunch and a 4 p.m. Beaty and his team tested subjects’ levels of creative thinking and behavior. The study found zero creative improvement among individuals with daytime insomnia and very slight, albeit statistically insignificant increases in creative behavior among individuals with nighttime insomnia. Why we have our best ideas in the shower: The science of creativity. 10 Simple, Science-Backed Ways To Be Happier Today. Editor's Note: This is one of the most-read leadership articles of 2013. Click here to see the full list.