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If you are a creative (that’s everyone!), and haven’t read Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon yet. I highly recommend it.

In addition to the great tips above here were a few others I highlighted:

“Seeing yourself as part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff. I hang pictures of my favorite artists in my studio. They’re like friendly ghosts. I can almost feel them pushing me forward as I’m hunched over my desk.”

“You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.”

“Go make that stuff. The manifesto is this: Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use—do the work you want to see done.”

“love ironing my shirts—it’s so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can.”

“In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what’s really important to them.”

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In this short novel the future is much like today but taken further to the extreme. Life goes from one distraction to the next. Walls are replaced with TV’s that have ‘family’ always on the screen, constantly engaging with the user it’s programed for. There are minimum speed limits so people don’t have time to think only the exhilaration of speed. The value of life is diminished to nothing, as people try and run the few walkers on the street over for fun, and finally books are outlawed and set ablaze by Fireman. Life in this grim future is all about keeping worries, fears, and disappointment at bay by filling our lives with trivial distractions.

Bradbury self describes himself as “a preventer of futures, not a predictor of them.” (Wikipedia) Though his foresight over 60 years ago is uncanny. From a world with attention spans reduced to 2 minute clips to, our chosen solitude with earbuds, and our insatiable desire to replace real relationships with technological substitutes. Many of the moments described in the book are beginning to happen today, and many more were brought to life in the recently released film Spike Jonze film, ‘Her’. I couldn’t help but relate to the film, when Montag, the lead in novel placed the ‘Sea-shell’ earbud in his ear.

I can’t recommend the novel enough. Amazingly I feel that every day that goes by this book becomes more and more relevant in my life.

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I read After Dark by Haruki Marukami just as we arrived into Tokyo for New Years. It was the first work I had read by Marukami and I really enjoyed his imagination and writing style.

Here is one of my highlights:

“You know what I think?” she says. “That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed ’em to the fire, they’re all just paper. The fire isn’t thinking, ‘Oh, this is Kant,’ or ‘Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,’ or ‘Nice tits,’ while it burns. To the fire, they’re nothing but scraps of paper. It’s the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there’s no distinction—they’re all just fuel.”

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A few months back I read Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl, a book recommended to me by James Victore when he was here visiting at the Holstee office. Frankl is a great story teller, and takes the reader with him on his journey, struggle through life in a Concentration Camp during WWI. The book was full of insightful pieces of life philosophy. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

“Frankl approvingly quotes the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.””

“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.”

“Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times.”

“You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.”

“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

“..that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

““Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.” (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.)”

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how”

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Austrian artist Klemens Torggler has reinvented the door with his latest project.

Called the Evolution Door 

Zoom Info

• Camera
• Aperture
• Exposure
• Focal Length

• iPhone 4S
• f/2.4
• 1/120th
• 4mm

Just read: The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin while staying at the ImpactX House in Tokyo, this book cover caught my eye and I read it while training to Kyoto and Hakone.

Being a business and finance graduate now working primarily on design I often find myself struggling with the balance of design and deductive strategy. Martin clearly lays how the benefits and weaknesses of both in approaching business opportunities and decisions. 

I appreciate the idea of turning ideas and innovation into and algorithm and heuristic while never giving up the priority of innovation as a strategic advantage as mysterious and unknown as it can often be.

The book is is a great read for any business minded person who wants to understand how a design oriented thinker approaches problems and on the flip, for a designer to see how an operational mind may react to the same challenge.

Recommended, enjoy!