The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

No matter what you say about your priorities, where you spend money and your time will prove them out.

A lifetime of mediocrity is a high price to pay for safety.

If you want to thrive, you need to systematically engage with other people, in part to be reminded that life is bigger than your immediate problems.

You need to go beyond hacks and quick fixes, and instead develop practices.

Our relationships will eventually grow stale unless we are diligent about directing and cultivating them.

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” —Dr. Seuss

You need to create space for your creative process to thrive rather than expect it to operate in the cracks of your frenetic schedule.

There is a persistent myth in the workplace that creativity is a mystical and elusive force that sits somewhere between prayer and the U.S. tax code on the ambiguity scale.

By acting, we make things concrete; action breeds motivation, not the other way around.

Don't go to the grave with your best work still inside of you. Die empty.

Knowing does nothing for you—it’s doing that matters.

There’s a difference between having a sense of where the project is headed and truly understanding the objectives,

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” —Charles Mingus

Remember that common sense is not common practice, and that people who succeed are often those who do the little, everyday things that others won’t.

No one lies on his deathbed wishing he’d had the time to reply to one more e-mail, but a great many people express regrets about not having treated life with more purpose.

The key to cultivating creatively stimulating relationships is threefold: you need relationships in your life in which you can be real, you need relationships in your life in which you can learn to risk, and you need relationships in your life in which you can learn to submit to the wisdom of others.

A lifetime of mediocrity is a high price to pay for safety. Paranoia undoes greatness.

Our passion wanes, because it's difficult to stay excited about the work when we feel that practical limitations will ultimately prevent us from really doing something we believe to be truly great.

Focus: Challenges, the Big 3, Clustering Relationships: Circles, Head-to-Heads, Core Team Energy: Whole-Life Plannin, Pruning Stimuli: Study Plan, Notation, Purposeful Experience Hours: Idea Time, Unnecessary Creating

It’s not about recording what’s happened; it’s about how what’s happened has affected or inspired you.

A good rule of thumb is that every single day should include some kind of stimuli that is directed at your personal growth (working through a book, studying a skill or technique, et cetera) and some kind of stimuli that you’ve sought out for purposes of advancing your work (an industry trend report, a research study, a trade magazine).

Are there unnecessarily complex systems in your life and work right now? Are there ways you can simplify them?

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” —Orson Welles

For creatives, slipping into an overly conceptual mode and ignoring your emotional intuitions, or simply becoming emotionally numb to your environment, is a very real danger.

One thing about creative work is that it’s never done. In different words, every person we interviewed said that it was equally true that they had worked every minute of their careers, and that they had never worked a day in all their lives. They experienced even the most focused immersion in extremely difficult tasks as a lark, an exhilarating and playful adventure.

You are responsible for… creating value that didn’t exist before you arrived on the scene.

this new map, the hunting party would set out on a new expedition, which, surprisingly, would lead to an abundant capture of game. The map was nothing but randomly created lines on a dried animal skin—why did it lead the hunters to success? The answer is that it forced them to look in places they had unknowingly left unexplored. It got them out of their rut. This is just like the power of community when it comes to your creating. Your circle can give you perspectives and insights that are akin to the lines on a crumpled animal hide, pushing you to look in places you may otherwise miss.

In order to establish healthy habits, you need to let go of things that are making you efficient but not necessarily effective.