Creativity is full of emotions—the reputational risk of not knowing how an idea will be received by stakeholders, the frustration of dealing with constraints and obstacles, conflict about directions to take, and elation when you finally develop a product. Successful creativity does not depend on the kinds of emotions experienced. Rather, it depends on your ability to harness the power of emotions and manage them when they get in the way of progress. In my book, The Creativity Choice: The Science of Making Decisions To Turn Ideas Into Action, I write about how to use emotional intelligence to manage the creative process, regardless of industry or job role.

Read this entire article – How to harness your emotions to fuel creativity via Fast Company

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The Notebook is a deep dive into the history and usefulness of notebooks over the centuries. The author takes a journey from the days of parliament, vellum, and finally into the world where cheap paper opened up the usefulness of notebooks to nearly everyone. He has us meet Leonardo da Vinci, whose notebooks are famous to this day, or Aminto Manucci and Luca Piacioli, the creators and philosophers of double-entry bookkeeping, who changed life in many ways beyond that. He discusses authors, thinkers, scientists, and artists, and what the notebook meant/means to them.

Most of us are familiar with notebooks and notetaking — usually from our school days or perhaps our college classes. For the most part, we understood the importance of taking notes as an aide memoir for the papers we needed to write and those dreaded exams of the end of the year. How could we possibly remember everything we needed at this time of our life where our brains were being stuffed with new information?

I find my own use of notes and notebooks continuing to the current day. Early on in my career as a technologist, taking notes was an important, if not critical, part of any job. In days before the Internet and the host of information at our fingertips, notebooks were how I retained all the information I gathered during my reading and my workday. If I developed a solution one day, I would likely need to refer to that solution weeks, months or years into the future. Without a notebook, I would’ve been lost. There was no Google Search, sub-Reddits, or ChatGPT. My peers and I, had to create our own, day by day, year by year. 

Even now, with all the technological tools that our fingertips, I still find myself keeping a notebook sometimes it might contain random thoughts, like diary, entries, or quick notes about a particular topic like events that I used to run columns I used to write and information about my many clients and their computers.

I found that using a paper notebook could be one of the most useful ways to establish your credibility in front of a client or in a meeting. There is something about opening your notebook, placing it in front of you, and starting to take notes, clients, peers, and bosses seem to sense as an important marker that I am getting down to business and I am taking it all seriously. Even knowing its usefulness, I am amazed at what an outsized effect it has on how people perceive you and your work.

Now that my days have slowed down with fewer clients and less work, I still find myself still maintaining a notebook, if not several. They usually contain thoughts on life and upcoming events with occasional notes that I’ll find useful in the yearly events which mark out our lives.

Even as a lover of technology and someone surrounded by it, I don’t have the same affinity for Digital notetaking that I have for the pleasure of writing with Pen and ink on a nice sheet of paper. Sometimes it is simply easier to open up my notebook and jot down a thought or a piece of information rather than take the time to pull out my phone and jot it into Notes or another application, even the short delay of firing up the app rankles me and sends me back to my notebook with a shrug.

If you are not already writing in your notebook regularly, The Notebook might just send you out to find your favorite notebook, pen, or pencil and start your journey through your thoughts and memories.

As you progress in your career, understanding the difference between being useful and being valued is very important. At first glance, they might look similar because the signals you get are more or less the same: a promotion, a higher than expected bonus, a special stock award. This is why it’s important to dig deeper and try to detect subtler signals.

Read this entire article – If you are useful, it doesn’t mean you are valued via Better Than Random

Accountability sinks via A Working Library

Buy The Unaccountability Machine via Bookshop.org

In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever.

Davies proposes that:

For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system.

Read this entire article – Accountability Sinks via A Working Library

Let’s say time comes to gut and renovate your bathroom: I can help you with that—demolition, framing, reworking the plumbing, moving some electrical, installing some mould-resistant drywall, maybe some nice tile for the floor and some classic glazed ceramic three-by-six subway tile for the tub surround. Should take a month or two, depending on what all’s involved. And as for you, hey, for the sake of your wife and kids, I think you better quit the flurry of furtive late-night texts to the sexy young co-worker and cut back a bit on your recreational drinking because wine is a mocker, so goes the proverb, as if those Facebook posts of you at the bar last week weren’t proof enough.

Repair and remain. Work with what you’ve got. Sit still for a moment, take stock, make some changes. Big changes, if necessary.

Read this entire article – Repair and Remain: How to do the slow, hard, good work of staying put by Kurt Armstrong

The 4 Types of Luck

In 1978, a neurologist named Dr. James Austin published a book entitled Chase, Chance, & Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty.

In it, Dr. Austin proposed that there are four types of luck:

Blind Luck

Luck from Motion

Luck from Awareness

Luck from Uniqueness

Here’s how to think about each type:

Read this entire article – The 4 Types of Luck by Sahil Bloom 

Optimism is dangerous, especially when it comes to planning our goals. If we underestimate the effort of an endeavor, we set ourselves up for failure. When we fail to meet our expectations, we can succumb to cynicism.

We must learn how much we can process to avoid the hope trap.

Domain, Duration, and Dimension

Imagine you have thousands of marbles to carry on a plane, and airport security released a new regulation that limits an individual to one jarful. If you don’t know the jar’s capacity, you won’t know how many marbles you can bring and could risk losing your precious orbs!

Read this entire article – Start with the Jar: How to understand your capacity via Turtle’s Pace

1. Read staggering amounts, regularly returning to the classics both fiction and non-fiction. 

2. Write your own notes of your daily learnings aiming for super concise summaries. In that way you must squeeze and reveal the essence of a subject. 

3. Stay active during the day. That’s not just ‘go to the gym’. Stay active; you’ll notice the ideas flowing so much more quickly and easily.

Plus 100 more!


Read this entire PDF file – How To Be More Intelligent 101 via Nicholas Bate

Full text of book is available in several formats on the web page.

In the spring of 2013, I unwittingly set off a very minor international sensation.

It all began when I was asked to write an essay for a new radical magazine called Strike! The editor asked if I had anything provocative that no one else would be likely to publish. I usually have one or two essay ideas like that stewing around, so I drafted one up and presented him with a brief piece entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”

The essay was based on a hunch. Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless. What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it? Certainly you meet people now and then who seem to feel their jobs are pointless and unnecessary. Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed—that was simply a waste of time or resources, or that even made the world worse? Would this not be a terrible psychic wound running across our society? Yet if so, it was one that no one ever seemed to talk about. There were plenty of surveys over whether people were happy at work. There were none, as far as I knew, about whether or not they felt their jobs had any good reason to exist.

Read the entire book

The Art of Finishing via Bytedrum

“It’s a quiet Saturday afternoon. I’ve carved out a few precious hours for coding, armed with a steaming cup of coffee and the familiar urge to dive into a project. As I settle into my chair and open my terminal, I’m confronted with a challenge that’s become all too familiar: deciding which of my many unfinished projects to tackle.

I navigate to my project directory, greeted by a graveyard of half-implemented ideas and stalled works-in-progress. Each one represents a different problem I’ve tried to solve, a different technology I’ve attempted to master. They’re all interesting, each with its own purpose and potential. But as I scan through them, I can already feel my enthusiasm waning. I know that whichever one I choose, I’ll be facing not just the original problem, but a hydra of new challenges that have sprouted since I last looked at the code.”

Read this entire article – The Art of Finishing via Bytedrum 

As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of those around us. It’s usually not even something we do consciously; we just see someone using a different tone of voice or shifting their body language, and something deep in our brain notices it.

If you’ve ever attended a meeting where there were some “weird vibes,” you know what I’m talking about. You couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but something about the energy of the room was off—and that feeling affected you, even if it was super subtle.

We’re wired to spidey sense this stuff; this gut instinct is part of what’s helped us stay safe for millenia. Our amygdalas are constantly on the lookout for threats in our environment that could be bad news. Plus, we tend to infer meaning from those weird vibes. Our brain is trying to make sense of the shift in behavior, so we’ll make some (often subconscious) guesses about what’s truly going on. We often even jump to the assumption that those vibes are about us.

Read this entire article – Be A Thermostat, Not A Thermometer via Lara Hogan

To get more creative work done, think like a car manufacturer. A system for optimising the creative process and breaking through your barriers.

Always Be Shipping

Have you made anything lately?

Have you published anything? Shipped anything? Finished something and put it into the world? Your answer will lie somewhere on the spectrum between ‘Yes – today!’ and, ‘No. Never.’

Your answer is important.

Tell me how often you ship, publish, or show the world what you’re doing and I’ll tell you where you’ll be in five years. In short: you’ll be doing incredibly well and far, far better than the person who said, ‘No. Never.’

If you are someone who is in the business of creating anything – whether it’s code, books, photographs, videos, lessons, physical products – the importance of regularly shipping what you make cannot be emphasised enough.

It is vital.

Read this entire article

Summary.   

Moral injury is experienced as a trauma response to witnessing or participating in workplace behaviors that contradict one’s moral beliefs in high-stakes situations and that have the potential of harming others physically, psychologically, socially, or economically, and it could prompt people to leave a company. It was first studied in veterans who’d witnessed atrocities of war. More recently, this research has been extended to health care, education, social work, and other high-pressure and often under-resourced occupations. The past two years have made it increasingly clear that moral injury can occur in many contexts and populations, including the workplace. As a new world of work unfolds before us and the pact between employee and employer gets rewritten, leaders have to learn and evolve to keep pace. The authors present six things leaders can do to ensure their actions aren’t unintentionally injuring the moral center of those they lead.

Read this entire article

Today, so many of us are wishing to safeguard ourselves — and our careers — against uncertainty. But how do we do this in a world where the waves of change keep coming and it can take all our energy just to stay afloat?

By thinking long term, says Dorie Clark, consultant and keynote speaker. “Long-term thinking protects us during downturns (of all kinds), because it keeps us moving toward our most important goals … It’s the surest path to meaningful and lasting success in a world that so often prioritizes what’s easy, quick, and ultimately shallow,” writes Clark in her new book The Long Game.

If we want to play the long game, one of the first things we must do is identify those goals so we’re able to make the adjustments needed in our lives to move towards achieving them. In this excerpt, she shares some strategies to assist people in pinpointing their goals.

Read this entire article

Get her book:

“A great interview does something else, too. A great touches the nucleus of being and potential, untouched by the forces of time and change.

One January afternoon several selves ago, I entered the corrugated black walls of a snug recording studio at the School of Visual Arts to sit at a microphone across from a woman dressed entirely and impeccably in black — a woman all stranger, all sunshine. I didn’t expect that, over the next hour, the warmth of her generous curiosity and her sensitive attention would melt away my ordinary reticence about discussing the life beneath the work. I didn’t expect that, over the next decade, we would become creative kindred spirits, then friends, then longtime romantic partners, and finally dear lifelong friends and frequent collaborators.”

Read this entire article

Get the book mentioned in the article

Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman

Feeling overwhelmed with work and personal tasks is one of the biggest problems that the people I work with are facing.

It turns out, our lives can be pretty overwhelming.

There’s so much to do, never enough time to do it, and who knows what we should be focusing on? We’re always behind, barely treading water. That’s our usual experience of life, it seems.

What can we do? It turns out, there are some powerful things we can practice with overwhelm, and there are some practical things we can do as well.

What follows is meant to be a kind of survival guide – not only how to survive your overwhelming life, but how to turn it into a life of joy and impact.

There are a lot of things below, which ironically can be overwhelming. Pick one, and try it.

Read Overwhelm: The Survival Guide 

Few things will change your trajectory in life or business as much as learning to make effective decisions. Yet no one really teaches us what it means to make consistently high-quality decisions.

I started working at an intelligence agency on August 28, 2001. Two weeks later, the world would never be the same. 1

My computer science degree lost its value after a few promotions. I came from a world of 1s and 0s, not people, families, and interpersonal dynamics.

Just out of school, I found that my decisions affected not only my employees but their families. Not only my country but other countries. However, there was one small problem. I had no idea how to make smart decisions. I had no idea how to reduce errors. I only knew I had an obligation to make the best decisions I could. But where do you start?

Read How to Make Smart Decisions Without Getting Lucky – Farnam Street

Managing people | Andreas Klinger

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

I believe almost all first-time founders burn out their first employees as they learn how to manage groups of people. If this advice helps avoid a few cases, it’s worth writing it down.

I wrote this article for managers of small teams/startups. I’d assume that most might not apply to management in larger enterprises. Btw here are my recommendations on joining hypergrowth companies in general.

Read Managing people | Andreas Klinger

Remote work, innovation, and the Great Resignation – Vox

Employees want to work from home. Their bosses, however, can’t wait to get back to the office. Knowledge workers think being remote makes their jobs better, while managers worry the arrangement could cause the quality of work to suffer. But in scapegoating remote work, companies may be disguising the real scourge of creativity right now: too much work.

Read Remote work, innovation, and the Great Resignation – Vox

I want to spend an essay talking about tacit knowledge, and why I think it is the most interesting topic in the domain of skill acquisition. If you are a longtime Commonplace reader, you’ll likely have come across this idea before, because I’ve written about it numerous times in the past. But I think it’s still good idea to dedicate a whole piece to the topic.

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone.

Think about riding a bicycle. Riding a bicycle is impossible to teach through descriptions. Sure, you can try to explain what it is you’re doing when you’re cycling, but this isn’t going to be of much help when you’re teaching a kid and they fall into the drain while you’re telling them to “BALANCE! JUST IMAGINE YOU ARE ON A TIGHTROPE AND BALANCE!”.

Read Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice – Commonplace – The Commoncog Blog