🎨  Purposeful Creativity

The ambidextrous mindset: how to balance exploration and exploitation

by

People who can both innovate and optimize are an extremely rare breed. Innovating requires a taste for risk taking and experimentation; optimizing calls for an altogether different skill set, mostly reliant on refinement and efficiency. That’s known as the exploration-exploitation dilemma. Great innovators are not always great managers. This is a common story: a founder …

Read moreThe ambidextrous mindset: how to balance exploration and exploitation

Curiosity and consistency: thoughts on growing a newsletter

by

Today, the Maker Mind newsletter just hit 25,000 subscribers! To celebrate, I asked you to share your questions about launching and managing a newsletter. Here are my thoughts. Wherever you are in your journey, I hope you find these answers helpful. How long did it take you to build up that audience? (David) I launched …

Read moreCuriosity and consistency: thoughts on growing a newsletter

Productivity and permaculture with Marie Poulin

by

Welcome to this edition of our Interview series, where we interview prolific creators, entrepreneurs, authors and researchers to ask them how they design their life and work. Today, our guest is Marie Poulin, a designer, teacher, and productivity expert. Before becoming a Notion specialist and productivity-extraordinaire, Marie co-founded a creative digital agency and launched a …

Read moreProductivity and permaculture with Marie Poulin

Idea evaluation: the other side of the creativity coin

by

Ideation is often thought to be mostly about idea generation. However, the process of developing ideas doesn’t stop there: it’s followed by an evaluation phase. Balancing idea generation with idea evaluation is crucial to the creative process. “Within the field of creativity, idea generation in general and the usefulness of idea generation methods has received …

Read moreIdea evaluation: the other side of the creativity coin

Investing into the unknown with Lawrence Yeo

by

Welcome to this edition of the Mindful Makers interview series, where we go behind the scenes with prolific creators and explore what makes them creative and productive. I’m incredibly excited to chat with Lawrence Yeo, the writer and illustrator of More To That, a blog that delves into what makes humanity so fascinating. I first …

Read moreInvesting into the unknown with Lawrence Yeo

50 lessons learned from writing 50 newsletters

by

This week marked an important milestone: I just sent the 50th edition of Maker Mind, a newsletter about mindful productivity. Countless hours of careful writing, thoughtful conversations with readers, and exploring strange rabbit holes to report back on what I learned. While I believe the best way to learn is to experiment for yourself, I …

Read more50 lessons learned from writing 50 newsletters

Inner child and inner critic: a battle for creativity

by

“It takes a very long time to become young,” Pablo Picasso once said. Adults miss the innocent curiosity of their youth; artists strive to reclaim their lost childlike creativity. The creative process often feels like a constant battle between an inner child and an inner critic. Can this creative battle turn into creative balance? Becoming …

Read moreInner child and inner critic: a battle for creativity

Creative challenges with Alyssa X

by

Welcome to a new edition of our interview series, where we meet with prolific creators and go behind the scenes to understand their creative process. Alyssa X is an incredibly talented designer, full-stack developer, and entrepreneur. Beside her full-time job at Metal, she launched many creative experiments. Her portfolio of projects includes a design tool …

Read moreCreative challenges with Alyssa X

From inspiration to idea sex: how to generate ideas on demand

by

Blank page syndrome, writer’s block—call it whatever you want, most creators have once faced this overwhelming lack of inspiration. If you do experience writer’s block from time to time, the best reaction is to go do something else: going for a walk, journaling, talking it out with a friend. Better yet, though, is to avoid …

Read moreFrom inspiration to idea sex: how to generate ideas on demand