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Creativity Life & Philosophy Psychology

Imagination is a mental scratch pad

Use your imagination

Imagination is a mental scratch pad, a place to delve into the urges of the non-existent. It is only there can we see what’s more captivating than reality’s everydayness.

Imagination not only protects us from boredom, it also protects us from ourselves. It acts as a neuroprotective stimulus for brain expansion — we are only as good as what we can envision.

Imagination helps us slice through the bedrock of the present. It moves us behind the boundary of facts. It screams yes to life, even when there’s darkness.

“Logic will get you from A to Z. Imagination will get you everywhere.”

Albert Einstein

What is the imagination good for? Absolutely everything.

Categories
Business Culture Fashion

A pedestal type of person

The best marketers bake their advertising into their work.

Whether you’re an athlete, an author, or a baker, the product speaks for itself. Your trade either breeds trust and gets shared by others or falls at the wayside.

Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan, and Albert Einstein put their money where their mouth was.

But there are of course ways to exaggerate one’s abilities.

David Beckham was a good football player, not great. Karl Lagerfeld was a good designer, but no one amazing. The difference is how these two talked about themselves during their careers and strategically elevated their game by raising their awareness platform.

Performance is only half of the story. The other half of the story is smart marketing and for consumers, a self-fulfilling truth. As Seth Godin so wisely notes in his book All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World, “We drink the can, not the beverage.”

Buyers acknowledge the artifice but also stand on pedestals they too think they deserve.

Categories
Creativity Productivity & Work

Building a prototype

via giphy

Amorphous. Elastic. A concept within a concept.

You can wait until you get your hands on a 3D printer to build out an idea, or you can create one now with silly putty, legos, or pen and paper.

The tools are tools, and our minds fabricate the rest. Stick figures may not produce reality, but they’re good enough to get a design across.

People learn best visually, information as a collection of stills. Tangibility is a nice to have. Whatever stimulates the senses, drives home the point.

You’re better off pulsating the mind with image clusters rather than depending on the persuasion of deadwood words.

Categories
Life & Philosophy Productivity & Work

Working backward

We all know what we want. Our main challenge is in getting there. But if we take our end-destination and outline the steps to achieve it working backward, it suddenly becomes less intimidating.

We can’t afford to skip any steps. Mastering each tread fortifies the fundamentals which help push us through temporary and unforeseen hurdles.

Greatness is scarce because so few people want to struggle.

They think they can perfect the work in theory over practice. Success is ultimately a summary of our failures.

We should feel compelled to identify what you want and map out the road it takes to get there. We may never arrive at the final destination but instead, be redirected to something even better than we could’ve imagined.

Categories
Arts Books

Mechanical paper tech by Kelli Anderson

Mechanical paper tech by Kelli Anderson
Mechanical paper tech by Kelli Anderson
Mechanical paper tech by Kelli Anderson
Mechanical paper tech by Kelli Anderson

These popup contraptions are extraordinary.

Created by artist Kelli Anderson, This Book Is a Planetarium (Amazon) book contains interactive constructions of a planetarium, a musical instrument, a speaker and more.

Writes the artist on her blog:

I published a pop-up book of mechanical paper tech.
Expanding out of This Book is a Planetarium’s pages, you’ll find: a stringed instrument, a perpetual calendar, a decoder ring, a spiralgraph drawing generator, a smartphone speaker, and—yes—a constellation-projecting planetarium. With a little tinkering, turning, and futzing: the resulting paper objects actually work! (despite of being made from “almost nothing.”)

The book was designed to showcase the potential of the material world—while making a case for the inherent educational value of lo-fi experiences.

In their clunky way of functioning, the past’s technology served this unacknowledged secondary function to humanity: These objects helped us glimpse—and therefore connect to —the magic of the physical world. By being glitchy and fussy (and by sometimes requiring manual tinkering or duct tape), lo-fi contraptions more transparently revealed the underlying laws of the world to us.

You can find out more about the book here.

Categories
Life & Philosophy Psychology

Relishing the doubt

gif by @raphaellemartin

Enthusiastic in the front, skeptic in the back.

The dialectic of mind enframes the rational man. When we peel off the plastic of certainty, we uncover the beauty of chasing ambiguity.

When we see that the true bearers of consciousness are patterns of continuous variation rather than preprogrammed automata, we relish our idiosyncrasies.

Naïveté is on par with idealism.

What we demand instead is the thrill of belief, vacuuming up all the information around us without pre-consolidating our vision with the cockiness of mastery.

Every single person has their own blend of style, just like the unique acoustic signature of birds. Wonderfully different, in search of random incursions.