One Creative Moment is a daily email for founders, owners, and creators. You'll get insights, irreverence, and inspiration to help you build a better business & live a more creative life.
If you want to be a writer, study electrical engineering
You’ll have to forgive me; I couldn’t find the quote I’m alluding to in the subject line. It’s from Kurt Vonnegut Jr., one of my longtime favourite writers.
I don’t know which book it comes from (I have almost all of them).
But the gist is if you want to become a writer, he recommends studying anything other than writing. That way, you’ll have something to write about.
Here’s a Vonnegut quote I did find that relates:
I’ve got this on my mind because of friend of the list, and fellow daily email aficionado, Kevin Freidberg’s piece Try Learning the Viola.
In it, he points out that “picking up a skill in a totally different area can improve a skill in the area you’re most interested in.”
The truth!
So many great ideas come from synthesis, from analogy. From taking knowledge in one sphere and applying it in another.
What you do when you’re away from the desk is potentially even more important than what you do when you’re not. So treat your life and leisure time accordingly. It is vital.
And what better time to say this than on a Friday?
Weekending,
James
One Creative Moment
One Creative Moment is a daily email for founders, owners, and creators. You'll get insights, irreverence, and inspiration to help you build a better business & live a more creative life.
One of the things missing from much of the “get AI to do everything for you” messaging is this fact: writing isn’t just a product, it’s a process. Yes, it’s nice to have “content.” But thinking that having it is the only outcome that matters is shallow and short-sighted. One of the things that has astounded me since I started writing daily(ish) emails back in November 2022 is how much it has changed me. It has vastly improved my ability to think—and to put those thoughts into clear, concise...
If you want to achieve more, do less. That is to say, build time into your day, your week, your year for quiet. In our house, following lunch, there is a period of mandated quiet time. It gives everyone a chance to do something they’d otherwise not do: nothing. It could be napping, reading, working on art, or even listening to something specific on headphones—as long as it’s quiet and done alone. For Kayte and I, it’s almost always napping, lol. During that time, we can recharge. We can...
“…We are ‘persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.’” This is Kate Raworth quoting Economist Tim Jackson in her book Doughnut Economics while discussing the power of aspiration in influencing human behaviour. Reading this, I realized that seeing (or at least feeling) this is what kept me from marketing for so long. (And what keeps me from engaging in much of its mainstream still.) I thought of it only as a...