A few folks forwarded different versions of this to me: hi+low had the image, but teczo had the writeup. And it appears to all come from an NPR story about Sister Corita Kent.

She was an art teacher who influenced many creatives, including Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Ray Eames, John Cage and Henry Miller, and is perhaps most famous for the 1985 love stamp.

1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
7. THE ONLY RULE IS WORK. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
8. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
10. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” - John Cage.

Helpful hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything always. Go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully often. Save everything, it might come in handy later.

Love it! You can see some of her work online or check out the recent book about her work.

Posted in creative thinking | 8 Comments »

The web is a funny place. I get requests to speak and write for people all the time, but sometimes the requests are from unexpected places, like, say, The U.S. State department. After a short chat with Alexandra M. Abboud, the coolest government employee I’ve ever known, I agreed to write an essay for their newly launched america.gov website, called How to innovate right now.

As a kicker, they run a monthly live webchat: anyone can sign in live and ask me questions.

Go to the Ask America website on Tuesday Feb 5th, 12pm EST. (The site currently says 9am EST, but it will be updated soon).

If you’ve got a question you’ve always wanted me to answer, now’s your chance.

And if you can’t make it, leave a question in the comments. That way when no one shows up in the live webchat, I’ll have something to do.

Posted in On Tour | No Comments »

• The tipping point reconsidered. A social network researcher at Yahoo disputes some of the claims of Gladwell’s book.
• The lifecycle of a blog post. What happens after you publish a post? This interactive diagram explains all.
• Edward De Bono, is a creative thinking master. In his 70s, he is a legend among creative thinking gurus, but his website design is circa 1995.
• Steve Frank has a review of trees. Satire on the sad state of tech writing today. Loved this.
• What advice would you give your younger self? Interesting question. The reverse is also good: what advice would the version of you ten years younger give to the older version of you today?

Posted in linkfest | 2 Comments »

Found this list in an old notebook - I have no idea what exactly prompted the list. Guess I was feeling ignored at work :) Instead of blaming others, I took a shot at self-criticism, and assumed the problem was mine. What could it be?

Why you are being ignored (The rude Q&A style list):

- You are not talking
- You are not saying anything they care about
- You aren’t convincing them why they should care
- You don’t share your passion
- You talk too much
- You sound stupid
- You are stupid
- You waste time and never get straight to the point
- You pick too many battles and have never won any of them
- No one has a reason to trust you
- You smell funny
- You have no power
- You have not earned anyone’s respect
- You always ignore everyone else

I’m sure you know someone who has potential, but always gets ignored - what else should be added to the list?

Posted in Management | 13 Comments »

Can you be creative without constraints?

It’s a tricky question. Creative people everywhere complain that they don’t have enough resources to be creative at work. In the lingo, “blue sky” refers to a project where the sky is the limit, and it’s the creative holy grail. “If only I could get a week to think blue sky, I could do amazing things”.

But one definition of creativity is the ability to transcend constraints. To find a clever way out of a difficult situation, or use a new idea to make lack of resources an advantage. I think about the Ramones or the Sex Pistols, bands whose lack of training became an asset. Spike Lee & Richard Rodriguez, filmmakers whose first films cost less than the price of a new car.

It’s interesting to notice how big corporations, with huge asset pools, tend to fail at being creative despite their blue sky budgets. Is there something in the nature of constraints that brings out the best creativity?

I think of constraints as a special tool - they’re flexible things. Constraints can be:

• interpreted differently
• intensified
• diminished
• created on purpose
• eliminated on purpose

Thinking like a manager, the goal is to have appropriate constraints that roughly match the goals. A team that is on life support needs to have constraints removed. But a team that is unfocused or out of control needs tighter constraints to function well.

Back in the 90s, Microsoft used to hire 3 people to do a project they knew required 5. Why? To create a set of constraints that self-motivated people would love. In trade for the extra work people received autonomy, and the net result was a creative, and productive, win.

Thinking like a individual, routines like writing an hour a day, or making a certain number of alternative designs, is a self imposed creative constraint to force my best work to surface, and in that sense I think everyone uses constraints in some way to help them be creative.

How do you use constraints in your creative work? Both at a personal level, but also at the project or team level?

(MacGyver is the patron saint of creative constraints).

Posted in creative thinking | 17 Comments »

Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene, authors of Head first PMP and Head first C++, are working on a new book called Beautiful Teams.

The goal for the book is to capture great stories about software development teams in a book, using a format similar to the bestseller Beautiful code. I think it’s a great idea and if all goes well I’ll be contributing a chapter.

If you think you can write about a true story from your experience in the tech-sector, that includes something about the team, and the relationships between people involved and how that helped or hurt the project, contact Stellman & Greene here.

Posted in Management, Software/Web development | No Comments »

One of my most popular blog posts ever, how to write a book, generates tons of comments and e-mail every week. Here’s an interesting one I couldn’t help but respond to:

David wrote:

Great article, gave me lots of inspiration and hope. I just submitted a proposal to O’Reilly, and it was rejected within 30 minutes. Very efficient, and very nicely worded, but devastating nonetheless. What do you do if you think you have a great idea, but the world disagrees?

The first rule of creative work: expect to be rejected. Ask anyone who reviews creative work of any kind, whether it’s screenplays, music demos, or book proposals, and they’ll tell you they reject a ratio of at least 20 or 30 to 1. Sometimes it’s 1000 to 1 in the case of movie actors or works of fiction. There is nothing wrong with you or your work simply because you have been rejected. Rejection means you are doing something many others want to do and it’s hard work.

Ask any writer, including the famous, how many rejection slips they’ve seen. They’ll laugh and tell you about how they papered their wall with them. Seriously, rejection is part of the game. I note many of these stories in The Myths of Innovation. The Star Wars screenplay was rejected by almost every major studio. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance was turned down over 100 times. Stephen King, J.K. Rawlings, John Grisham, you name it, they’ve been rejected. Do not give up hope: instead, use rejection as fuel. Prove them wrong. Get better at your craft. Work harder, and when you’re finished, send them a signed copy with your warmest regards.

In some ways how you handle rejection is self selection for creative work - if you cant handle a few rejections from publishers, how will you handle a few bad reviews of your finished book? No matter what you do, if you’re making something, many people won’t like it. In fact the more popular the thing is, the more people who will pick on it and for increasingly trivial reasons.

As I mentioned in the post, one major advantage of living in 2008 is how cheap it is to make things yourself. The only approval you need to create something is your own. You can self publish a book, make a video or a bunch of mp3s for just a few hundred bucks. If the world isn’t behind you, to hell with the world - do it anyway. The only thing stopping you is you.

Posted in Innovation, On writing, creative thinking | 6 Comments »

The ever creative ze-frank is currently asking a great question about creative process.

From his current post:

When you make things with an audience in mind, do you have internal representations of that audience to help guide you in the process? Are you in dialogue with a cast of proto-audience members that somehow represent different facets of your perceived audience? Are there little homunculi that provide editorial voices different from your own?

My answer, which I posted, is that I don’t have formalized characters when I’m writing a book or preparing a talk. But there is an ongoing dialog in my head when revising that approximates three or four imaginary people:

1. The curious neophyte. If someone at random walked in off the street would any of this make sense? Would they keep reading/listening?
2. The expert asshole. What if the person who knew everything about this subject and loved to criticize read this paragraph or heard this lecture. What vitriol would I hear? What bullshit would they call me on?
3. The daily grinder. How about the guy who actually does whatever I’m talking about for a living and when I’m done will go straight back to work. Will anything I write or say impact what he does the rest of the day? week? month?
4. The fan. Will someone familiar with my work find this boring? repetitive? derivative? Can I make this more fun for them instead of less?

Posted in On writing, creative thinking | 3 Comments »

Awhile ago a wrote an essay on how to give and receive criticism. Writing about it is one thing, but doing is another. Recently I saw someone handle a tough situation in public quite well - here’s the story:.

Sun engineer Bryan Cantrill gave an offhand review, at a videotaped talk at google, of Rosenberg’s recent book, Dreaming in code (A book I reviewed last year). Rosenberg, instead of doing what many bloggers do, and either a) ignore the issue or b) escalate things into a juvenile flamewar, he looked carefully for the intent, instead of the sizzle, of Cantrill’s statements and offered a well reasoned response.

The result was an intelligent, respectful, and illuminating discussion than spanned across both blogs. Kudos!

Anyone know of other recent examples of maturity handling of criticism? This should awards for this kind of thing.

Posted in books | No Comments »

AOL announced recently that the Navigator web browser will be no more. Navigator 1.0 started the web for most of the tech sector, and their success, and Microsoft’s response in 1994 gave me a ticket for a wild ride, working on IE 1.0-5.0 in the mid 1990s.

For a trip down history lane, check out the archive of most web browsers known to man.

Posted in web browsers | No Comments »

Hi folks - you may know I make most of my living performing lectures and teaching workshops. I love to teach and it provides a solid income to support all the writing I do here and in books.

After 4 years of doing this exclusively for hire by fancy companies, universities and big conferences, I’m exploring offering my best courses to the public, so anyone interested can throw tomatoes at me in person.

What I’m looking to find out is:

1) Are there enough people interested in Seattle?
2) Which course I should offer first?
3) How much would you (or your company) pay for a day of training?

If you live in the Seattle area, please give the short survey a spin. Will take you exactly 45 seconds. Cheers!

If I can get this running here in my hometown, I’ll happily take the show on the road to other cities if, and where, there’s enough interest.

Posted in Seattle, Teaching/Training | No Comments »

On days like this when someone famous is honored, I try to dig up something they wrote to compare what I think I know about that person and why they’re famous, with what they actually did and said. It’s always enlightening, but sometimes I find unexpected gems like this:

(yes it’s 3 long paragraphs, but I bet you $50 it’s the best writing you’ll read today).

Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.

Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: “Improved means to an unimproved end.” This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the “without” of man’s nature subjugates the “within,” dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.

If we believe this, then why is so little of what we talk about when we use the word innovation directed at helping people make, in MLKs terms, internal progress?

Read the full transcript of MLK’s amazing acceptance speech for the Nobel prize, from Dec, 1964.

(hat tip to truehoop)

Posted in Innovation, philosophy | 7 Comments »