Articles from metaphor
Your Creative Fingerprint
Just as we each have unique physical fingerprints, we each have a unique creative fingerprint. The loops, arches, and whorls in your creative fingerprint are shaped by the impulses that drive your creativity, your creative strengths, and your formative life, artistic, and spiritual experiences. But there’s a shift that takes place when you choose to make creativity a primary area of focus in your life: your creative fingerprint becomes your identity.
The Art of Time-Shifting
Most of our discussions about time are focused on finding time, managing time, and measuring the outputs of our investments of time. Time-shifting is a different way of thinking about time that’s particularly useful for creative work. It isn’t about moving around blocks of time on your calendar—it’s about learning how to recognize different rhythms of time and shift between them.
Perfection and the Persistent Process of Becoming
I’m a perfectionist. Perhaps you are too… Most of us think of perfectionism as a personal failing—a toxic combination of overly high personal standards and unrelenting self-judgement. But perfectionism is deeply ingrained in our culture. It’s time to reframe the idea of perfection and develop a new relationship with perfectionism.
Drops in the Bucket: Four Ideas on How to Make Progress on Your Creative Projects
Creativity is choice: the result of prioritizing your creative work over the other areas of your life making demands on your time and energy. Easier said than done in some circumstances… The ideas in this article will help you reprioritize your task list, regain control of your time, and make steady progress on your creative projects.
Random Events and Other Useful Distractions
We are living in the “age of distraction,” a phrase so pervasive a Google search for it yields nearly 600,000 results. A search for its antidote, “focus mode,” yields over 6.2 million results. People are desperate for relief from endless distraction. But while distractions are a problem, the elevation and pursuit of the antidote, of “focus mode,” has a shadow side. Our obsession with focusing closes us off from a vital source of creativity: useful distractions.
Give Your Creativity a Clutter Boost
My office is a mess—the most cluttered and disorganized it’s been in years. Why? Because my mind has been elsewhere. The mess in my office isn’t the residue of neglect, it’s a wayfinding system. But the clutter around me may also serve another purpose, it may be fueling my creativity.
