During the pandemic, Broadway legend Harvey Fierstein turned his quilting hobby into a full-time gig. (Check out his studio setup.) Today, he shows his work at museums and hosts “bitch and stitch” sessions with his quilting circle. “Being an artist is constantly trying to figure out who you are,” he says about his reinvention.
The extreme hype surrounding generative AI and technologies like LLMs has been exhausting over the last few years. Coupled with fear-based marketing against a backdrop of rolling layoffs—“if you’re not embracing AI you’ll be left behind”—it’s downright toxic. You can’t toss a rock on LinkedIn without hitting some thinkfluencer sharing the AI prompts and products that will solve all your problems, or celebrating the latest unicorn someone vibe-coded last week.
My former colleague Lisa Woodley recounts her 20-year path from designer to corporate sales leader and back. Like so many who shift their focus in the second half of their career, a health crisis that gave her lots of time to think was her catalyst. Some great, thoughtful guidance here for anyone also on their way back home to their true work.
There’s a profound difference between 3 seemingly similar ways to spend time:
sitting around and making things, either alone or with people you want to be around, which is a fundamentally human experience
sitting/standing around and making things with people you’ve been ordered to work with, on things you’ve been ordered to make, on a full-time work schedule set by someone else
performing all the capitalist ceremonies of the previous bullet point, but you’re not even making anything yourself
All 3 get muddled together in discussions and in subjective experience, and in any case most people only experience the 2nd or 3rd one for large swaths of their lives.
It takes a while, post-retirement, to let go of all the nonsense from those ways of being, and instead to return to the simpler and more human acts of chopping wood, carrying water, and making things for their own sake.
— Redditer ScoobyDoobyGazebo on how deeply “people don’t understand the grasp work and productivity has on their lives.”
Molly Graham shares a useful exercise for anyone deciding on a path: Visualize your inner voices as passengers in a car. One of them is driving, the other is in the front seat navigating, a couple are in the backseat, and someone’s stuffed in the trunk. When you want to go in a certain direction, ask yourself: Which part of me has the wheel? Who’s in the trunk? What would happen if they switched spots?
A couple of weeks ago I turned 50 years old, which is a sentence my fingers feel strange typing because in my mind I’m still somewhere in my late 20s. Age perception is weird like that. There’s a polite assumption your loved ones (and your financial planner) like to make, which is that you will live to be 100 years old. Actuarial tables tell a more likely story, but I don’t care: I’m going to try to reach centenarian status.
Working back from there, I think of this 50th birthday as halftime—that pause mid-game when players get to run off the field, take a breather, review what’s happened so far, and strategize what’s next (ideally while Shakira and J. Lo do this show).
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(via) An all-time great story of creative release: It’s 1995, and Mariah Carey is recording her fifth album Daydream. She’s also in a terrible marriage, longing to be free from it and her pristine pop image. To blow off steam, she writes a grunge rock album inspired by alt-rock bands like Garbage, Hole, and Sleater-Kinney. She records it at night with the band after the Daydream sessions, channeling her frustrations into the music, and picks the most perfect name for such a project: Someone’s Ugly Daughter. When you’re feeling one-dimensional, never forget: Mariah Carey recorded Always Be My Baby at the same time as Demented.
Completing tasks, no matter how inane, made me feel productive—and through the years I’d convinced myself that I needed to be productive at all times in order to achieve broader life goals. Never you mind the fact that most of those tasks have no real importance and frequently represent phony work.
—This wonderful, first-person account on Living a FI describes what it takes to deprogram the stay-busy mindset that plagues ambitious people who crush their todo list (but miss out on life). Anyone else give yourself a nightly performance review of whether or not you got enough done that day? Yeah. This one’s for us.
For months I worked toward being ready to flip the switch from private to public on this blog. When I finally did it, it felt great. For a couple of days, I rode a launch high, helped along by likes, comments, kind emails, newsletter subscribers, and bug reports (true gifts). Then I got very self-conscious and clammed up. What am I ever going to write about again? With people watching??
In the meantime, a lot happened. I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir, a masterclass in vulnerability and sharing one’s inner life. My kid leveled up from a pre-teen to a teen. My spouse got Covid. The political situation in the U.S. continued to become more unhinged by the day. I turned 50 and went on a fabulous trip to another world to celebrate.
I’m back at my desk now, ready to thaw out. Thank you for being here.
I asked Mike Monteiro how he thinks about his creative practice, and he wrote about how much he loves folding socks. Life’s most mundane and creative activities are interconnected.
Hello world. This is my new blog. I’ve been writing it in private for awhile now, so I’m glad you’re here. Check out what it’s all about, then I hope you’ll explore and find something interesting.
I usually post something new a couple times a week. If you’d like a monthly roundup via email, subscribe to the newsletter.
A lot has changed since I started writing on the web half a lifetime ago, but I believe one thing hasn’t: sharing what’s on your mind brings you closer to finding your people and yourself. I’m glad to be back at it. What are you working on? I’d love to hear about it—get in touch.
Singer-songwriter EJAE recorded a couple of voice notes on her way to the dentist which became the mega-hit earworm Golden. EJAE was the voice of lead singer Rumi in KPop Demon Hunters, Netflix’s most popular movie of all time, and my favorite movie of the year. For the fans!
One way I’m breaking my Amazon habit is by patronizing independent bookstores through Bookshop. Check out my favorite books on creativity, making stuff, and living well at my Bookshop.
When you focus on maximizing productivity, you inhibit creativity. In many ways, productivity and creativity are at odds.
Productivity is all about getting stuff done more efficiently: completing tasks and projects to meet your obligations and be successful. Capitalism relies on ever-increasing levels of human productivity. It always asks: What is the most value you can bring with the least amount of time and effort?
On his 50th birthday, Anil Dash shares five ways to treat others, make things, and treat yourself. These five things confirm why Anil is my friend, mentor, and cofounder, whose expertise includes the ability to frame the passage of time in huge terms. Happy half-century, Anil!
Parenthood reminds me on a daily basis: there’s a big difference between intellectual and experiential knowledge. Lessons from a book or teacher pass easily. Experiencing something firsthand—that is, getting your body involved—is how you absorb information into your bones.
No matter how often I tell my kid what I know, she won’t fully learn until she does things herself, often the opposite things I advise. Hard to watch! But this is attendance in the school of life, where her experience will always be a more effective teacher than I can be.
(via) Kevin Kelly’s excellent essay about publishing today is that it’s all about self-publishing. These points jumped out at me:
The traditional approach to publishing a book—write a proposal, get an agent, get a publisher, get an advance, write the book, do a tour, collect royalty checks—is over. (This related piece on the dire economics of traditional book publishing concurs.)
Even with an agent and publisher, it’s up to you to supply your audience and market to them. (This was my experience with the Lifehacker book 15 years ago.)
On-demand printing software and services are better than they’ve ever been for self-publishers. I especially like Kelly’s flow chart of platform recommendations depending on your goals and content. First question: “Have an audience?”
The audience for text is stagnant and skews older, while the audience for video continues to expand while getting younger.
Being a book author has a lot more cachet attached to it than being a blogger. I’ve been both, and for me, engaging with an audience online is way more fun and fulfilling than having a book with my name on it sitting on a shelf.
When your self-worth is linked to your productivity, you see every activity in your day as either valuable (productive) or not. I have this disease. At some point, the ability to check items off a todo-list stops moving you forward, and instead holds you back. Rick Foerster argues for the value of “unproductive” time without metrics.
What did you figure out on sabbatical? What was the takeaway from the 10-day? When you give yourself time and space to ask big questions, you expect to have an epiphany. But there are no lightning bolts. Instead, you get a whisper or a notion, wisps of ideas and longings. Some pass quickly, others tug your sleeve. Some dissipate given attention, others take root with nurturing. Stop checking your watch and wondering when the revelation will arrive, and listen for the whispers instead.
Happy Pride! The Trevor Project is the leading suicide prevention nonprofit organization supporting LGBTQ+ young people. When you donate to Trevor, you can multiply your impact thanks to matching organizations. Donate to The Trevor Project now.
Confusing intensity and passion is a common mistake. Intensity is external; passion invokes something inside you. Passion is a call-and-response with your soul. It’s not just adrenaline.
— Po Bronson makes a useful distinction in his book What Should I Do with My Life? (my review). It’s easy to look back at intense, adrenaline-driven times in your career and feel nostalgia for the clarity of focus, but it doesn’t necessarily mean what you were doing was your passion.
Jenn Schiffer shares a useful list of websites where you can get beautiful, free images licensed for use in your creative projects.
I enjoy a few blogs and newsletters that obviously use gen AI to make header images. Those images do the writing zero favors. As I writer, I understand the impulse to outsource image generation to an AI tool where you can describe what you want with words. But just because you can, does not mean you should. Imagery that’s obviously generated by AI has a who cares smell about it, and I don’t use it here.
Years ago I was at Disneyland in California with my family, taking a lunch break between rides. As I sipped my drink and watched the crowd passing by, I spotted someone I recognized: Ron Moore, creator of the TV series Battlestar Galactica. I was a huge BSG fan who was sad the series had ended. Starstruck, I abandoned all vestige of a chill New Yorker who sees and ignores celebrities, and I ran up to him to thank him for the show. He was kind and gracious—and said something I never forgot.
(via) Steve Krouse nails the difference between vibe coding and programming with AI assistance: “Vibe coding is on a spectrum of how much you understand the code. The more you understand, the less you are vibing.”
His graph is a useful check to plot your own AI-assisted coding projects. Rapid prototypes, hobby apps, and low-stakes, low-maintenance projects are great candidates to be high on vibes, while the serious stuff you intend to expand and maintain should land further on understanding.
