I started making vision boards eight years ago, and I find them a great help in staying focused on what’s important to me. If I get sidetracked or wrapped up in stress, I can just glance at my vision board and I’m reminded of what really matters in my life. A vision board is a piece of poster board with…
Creativity is more complex than the maps we fashion to understand it. “There being no known method from the known to the unknown,” as the narrator of James Joyce’s über-imaginative Ulysses said, ascertaining what facilitates creativity might seem like a fool’s quest. Psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint, a neglected classic in the literature on the creative…
We are what we consume. We thrive on a diet of inspiring ideas, deeds, and art, and languish when we lack emotional, intellectual, and spiritual nourishment. We are being polluted every day. And it’s not just the unhygienic water or the contaminated air or the nutrient-depleted food. It’s the unprecedented amounts of mindlessness and sleaze in media, entertainment, and politics. In…
I was introduced to “brainstorming” when I worked as a copywriter many years ago. Most ad agencies consider it an essential tactic for creating new campaigns. In the advertising world, brainstorming involves a copywriter and an art director sitting together in a room, where they lob headlines and images at each other in search of the perfect ad. When the…
