Bringing sense to ideas
View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) Our best work seldom just comes to us. It’s a byproduct of a process.
Think of how top performers get things done. The musician who practices for weeks to nail down that one-night performance. The athlete who trains under tough conditions to prepare for competition.
Process hones the craft.
Writing is no different.
That’s why I devote a lot of time to two products that pay me zero in income but are without question the keys to what helps me continue to grow as a professional.
The first product is CreativeBoost.
Not only does it keep teaching me the virtue of self discipline, it rewards me with generous feedback from readers who tell me how much it helps them in their own work.
But a newsletter is a structured enterprise. There’s planning and research involved. Some drafts sit in my to-do folder for months while I ruminate.
The second product is journaling. There, things are completely disorganized on purpose. But it wasn’t always that way. And so I struggled.
I took the advice of my good friend and artist Juliana McDonald (http://julianamcdonald.ca) . She makes a daily habit of writing three pages long form unedited, stream of consciousness style. “Creating is a lifestyle,” she says.
Borrowing that approach has helped me a lot.
It gave me the permission to stop worrying so much about outcomes. There’s no audience, no pressure.
Just a place to assign words to feelings and thoughts.
I use an app called DayOne for this. Since it syncs to both my phone and my Mac, I can treat it like a digital shoebox where I cram in all the odds and ends of my ideas.
So keep that in mind, |NAME|, as you dig deeper into the business of being creative.
We bring sense to our ideas through process.
Some of that involves bringing order to chaos.
But if you can also sometimes just let chaos be, interesting things will happen in how your body of work comes together.
Very best, Patrick http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=|URL:MC_SUBJECT|: |URL:ARCHIVE_LINK_SHORT| Tweet (http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=|URL:MC_SUBJECT|: |URL:ARCHIVE_LINK_SHORT|) http://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=|URL:ARCHIVE_LINK_SHORT| Share (http://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=|URL:ARCHIVE_LINK_SHORT|)
============================================================ |IFNOT:ARCHIVE_PAGE| |LIST:DESCRIPTION|
Our mailing address is: |LIST_ADDRESS| |END:IF|
unsubscribe from this list (|UNSUB|) update subscription preferences (|UPDATE_PROFILE|)
|IF:REWARDS| |REWARDS_TEXT| |END:IF|