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Creativity
Just stumbled upon this gem: Hemingway’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. You can easily replace “writing” with whatever creative task you do.
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. -
The Internet is a Customer Service Medium
Paul Ford:
“Why wasn’t I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.
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What I’m Working On: Bold Hatter Loyalty
Members of the loyalty program will be automatically upgraded to new levels of membership at predefined thresholds. Everyone starts with the basic black and gold, and as they reach new heights, they receive special cards sent to them in the mail, or given to them by the associate alongside their free hat. When the customer gets their first free hat after the first ten purchases, they are given a level two card. After the next ten, a level three card, and so on. This rewards the customer at each level of commitment, and can even serve as additional incentive to friends or other customers who see them flash a uniquely designed card at checkout to get to the next level themselves. There could be additional benefits associated with each level of membership, ie. a free feather with every Heritage purchase, or a free hat box also included with subsequent free hats earned.
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The Rise of the New Groupthink
Susan Cain, for the New York Times:
SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.
I find I work better and faster when isolated from interruption, and have not done too well in “open office” layouts. Far too much noise and drive-by interruptions.
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Steve Jobs (1955-2011)
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
(via Techcrunch)
