Category Archives for Creativity
The Flow State and Its Unusual Hiding Spot
We all crave it–– that mystical mindset, where the words pour out of our souls and splash onto the page in just the right order.
It’s a grand feeling that can become addicting once achieved.
I imagine Neil Gaiman feels it every time he sits down to write, if his muse doesn’t just scoot him out of the chair and write for him.
So, how do the rest of us get there? The flow state, that is.
What’s Making It Hard to Find My Passion?
Finding our passion has become the new “dance like no one’s watching.”
Passion has become the new byword for vocation — an occupation or activity at which you’re particularly good and to which you feel a strong attachment. In short, it’s your calling in life, and you’re supposed to find it to allow you to follow the perfect career.
There is a bottomless well of advice out there on how to find your passion. But what if you’ve read all the articles, done all the exercises, and still can’t figure out what your passion is?
How Can Boredom Make You More Blissfully Creative?
Endless stimulation and engagement are what the internet seems to be built for.
However, the infinite links between billions of texts, videos, and images have also shown us how quickly we can become bored by each new piece of flotsam that wells up from the fathomless depths of the cyber-ocean.
Jonathan Franzen characterizes engagement with the internet in the following way: when we project “ourselves onto a cyberworld … there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning. To be everything and more is the Internet’s ambition” (Farther Away).
Franzen’s essay goes on to reckon with the suicide of his friend and fellow novelist, David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s depression, Franzen reasons, was bound up with his inability to escape boredom.Continue reading
Idea Generation – How Ideas Are Made
There may be no two words in the English language that, when put together, strike fear in my heart quite like:
“Let’s brainstorm.”
Upon the utterance of such a phrase, which implies that I need to somehow instantaneously create or invent not one, but a plethora of ideas – good, bad, and “interesting” – quickly, out loud and in a group, no less… well it’s enough to make my poor, introverted brain explode.Continue reading