Thoughts & Quotes

Always demand a deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary.

A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different.

Different is better.

If you ask for someone's feedback, you'll get a critic.

If you ask for someone's advice, you'll get a partner.

Your 20s are the perfect time to do a few things that are unusual, weird, bold, risky, unexplainable, crazy, unprofitable, and look nothing like success.

For the rest of your life these experiences will serve as your muse.

When making plans, you must allow yourself to get lost in order to find the thing you didn't know you were looking for.

Cultivate an allergy to average.

You must first follow the rules with diligence in order to break them with productivity.

The greatest teacher is called doing.

Right now, no matter your age, these are your golden years.

The good stuff will yield golden memories and the bad stuff will yield golden lessons.

Re-visioning the ordinary is what art, literature, and comedy do.

You can elevate mundane details into magical wonders simply by noticing them.

Advice like these are not laws.

They are like hats.

If one doesn't fit, try another.

Ask anyone you admire:

Their lucky breaks happen on a detour from their main goal.

So embrace detours.

Life is not a straight line for anyone.

Separate the processes of creating from improving.

You can't write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time.

If you do, the editor stops the creator.

While you write the first draft, don't let the judgy editor get near.

At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgment.

Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be.

Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe.

And you can get better at it.

It's the one skill in life that befits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

Art is in what you leave out.

You don't need more time because you already have all the time that you are going to get;

you need more focus.

If you know what you want to do and you do it, that's the work of a craftsman.

If you begin with a question and use it to guide an adventure of discovery, that's the work of the artist.

Embrace failure as part of the process.

Every failure is an opportunity to learn and grow.

Without failure, we would never progress or improve.

Look for what you notice but no one else sees.

A river of material flows through us. When we share our works and our ideas, they are replenished. If we block the flow by holding them all inside, the river cannot run and new ideas are slow to appear.

In the abundant mindset, the river never runs dry. Ideas are always coming through. And an artist is free to release them with the faith that more will arrive.

If we live in a mindset of scarcity, we hoard great ideas.

Discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are partners. Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it is a harmonious relationship with time.

Managing your schedule and daily habits well is a necessary component to free up the practical and creative capacity to make great art.

Often the most accurate signposts are emotional, not intellectual.

Excitement tends to be the best barometer for selecting which seeds to focus on.

Failure is the information you need to get where you're going.

The goal is not to fit in. If anything, it's to amplify the differences, what doesn't fit, the special characteristics unique to how you see the world. Instead of sounding like others, value your own voice. Develop it.