Hello friends,
I recently published How to launch a creative passion project today without feeling overshelmed. In 6 simple steps, you could be on your way to making real, actionable steps toward building a meaningful creative project.
This is the exact methodology I use to plan and execute creative projects outside my nine-to-five job. The best part might be the free one-page project planner that I use to get organized.
Reflection Question
Why do we oscillate between motivation and procrastination?
This prompt was brought to you by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Creative Resources!
Cultivating a Sense of Creative Purpose by 99u
Much like developing your creative voice or building up confidence, defining your purpose can be a life-long pursuit that shifts and changes over the course of your career. Whether mired in writer’s block or tackling an ambitious project, naming and defining a sense of purpose can be the touchstone that gives you crucial momentum when you need it most. We asked creatives to reflect on what defines their intention and gives their work meaning.
On My Love-Hate Relationship With Productivity](https://thefinancialdiet.com/on-my-love-hate-relationship-with-productivity/) from The Financial Diet
Just because you love your work doesn’t mean you’re not working. Sometimes it leads to greater burnout because your passion and your means of income are combined. Therefore, your source of creative expression_and_your livelihood depend on the same thing. Still, we we’re told if we work harder, fasting, longer, more, we’ll get to the front of the class. The top of the workforce. We’ll be able to control our success and we’ll become the best.
Quote of the Week
Birds are dinosaurs, descended from the lucky, flexible few that survived whatever cataclysm did in their cousins. We are mammals, related to the timid, diminutive shrewd-like creatures that emerged from the dinosaurs’ shadows only after most of those beasts died off. While our mammal relatives were busy growing, birds, by the same process of natural selection, were busy shrinking. While we were learning to stand up and walk on two feet, they were perfecting lightness and flight. While our neurons were sorting themselves into cortical layers to generate complex behavior, birds were devising another neural architecture altogether, different from a mammal’s but—in some ways, at least—equally sophisticated. They, like us, were figuring out how the world works, and all the while, evolution was fine-tuning and sculpting their brains, giving their minds the magnificent powers they have today.
— Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds