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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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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While I currently have two books in the works that I’m readying for release, I started working on an idea for my next one several months ago. I use that word “working” pretty loosely. All I did was watch a bunch of movies on a theme and start keeping my eyes open for interesting and […]
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Michelangelo famously described the sculpting process like this: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry described the writing process this way: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” What a fascinating resonance […]
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Often, a specific panic sets in when I feel like I’m not making good use of my time. Suddenly, I start to experience my work as a race against death. Every second wasted not making something that will go into the world is a waste of the tiny amount of life I’ve been allotted. I […]
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You may have read on my Facebook page this week that I completed a draft of my forthcoming book Spendshift. Because I’ve been able to focus on writing it intensively, it took me just over two months to complete the manuscript, which is my fastest ever. I woke up the day after I saved the […]
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“Be so good they can’t ignore you.” – Steve Martin “When it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality.” – Adam Grant I’ve always loved the above Steve Martin quote for its boldness and sass. Its motivating in the sense that, if you feel your work is being ignored, the onus […]
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“If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they […]
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