Everyone has hardships, even those with the happiest, most blessed lives. Everyone goes through things that nobody should have to go through. Everyone says and does things that haunt them. Everybody also has moments where they leap out of their skin and join with the universe. Artists take life’s most vivid experiences and give expression […]
Read MoreWhen sharing ideas, pure enthusiasm can be an enemy. People seem to recoil from the appearance that you have not considered the other side, and so they put themselves on that other side as a matter of due diligence. This can get ugly, and turn into real opposition. Your tendency may be to push harder […]
Read MoreWe sift through dozens if not hundreds of pieces of information each day — conversations, articles, news feeds, analytics. What if, after encountering some of the more interesting bits, we jotted down a note or two, or even did a 20 second sketch of what we just saw? A simple switch in our mode of […]
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Over the years, I’ve put out a lot of creative work: three books, five business ventures, a PhD dissertation, tons of paintings and digital art, university courses, countless articles, interviews, websites, blog posts, etc. On and on. Yet despite this output, I’ve been plagued with a question for as long as I can remember. It’s […]
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When I worked as a sales guy for the now-defunct Canadian retail chain Future Shop, my colleagues and I were constantly at each other’s throats for “scooping” customers. It was survival of the fittest — a limited number of sales to go around on any given day. In that environment, lack of ethics was a […]
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I cracked the psychology of a character in my forthcoming novella Clickbait today. This guy, Bryan, has been just kind of sitting there, nestled in between the book’s other 5 characters, being a bit of a bore. He wasn’t really on my radar because his story just kind of fit with everything else without being […]
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For the past three weeks, I’ve been immersed in a web development project, one that I’m hugely proud of, but one that’s been all-consuming to say the least. Prior to this, I was regularly going to yoga, taking walks, working in a variety of places I found interesting, and switching tasks based on my mood […]
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Last week I interviewed Murat Pak, the creator of @Archillect, an artificial (or synthetic) intelligence that curates online images. As people’s reactions started to pour in, one pattern above all caught my eye. Certain people were stunned when they realized for the first time that their favourite curator of beautiful, inspiring images was not, in […]
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Ignorance always gets a bad rap. Sure they say “ignorance is bliss” but it’s with the underlying implication that if you opt for that particular kind of bliss, you’re basically a fool whose world is bound to come crashing down around you. If not that, at the very least you will have to walk through […]
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I’ve been working through a great book called The Artist’s Way for about five months now, which provides a self-directed course on breaking through artistic blocks and cultivating creativity. One of the most useful ideas is the “morning pages,” which consist of a daily, three-page word dump, wherein you write out anything and everything that […]
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