Category: Productivity

Is Your Ambition Holding You Back?

Or is it the desperation your ambition creates? Think about it while you read a few very choice words:

ambitionby Andrew Dumont

When ambition eats at you, it feels like no matter how much you accomplish or how hard you work, you haven’t done enough. There’s always more to do. There’s always others doing more. It’s a never-ending battle. Sound familiar?

Many days I’ve spent in this state, watching as others passed by while I fell deeper under the growing pile of career milestones that I wished to tuck under my belt. This pile paradoxically growing more unreachable as I achieve more of what I set out to accomplish. The fear of mediocrity always lurking. read article

The Real Link Between the Psychopathology Spectrum and the Creativity Spectrum

Years ago, our Beloved Leader, Larry Brody’s writing mentor at Northwestern University, E.B. Hungerford, told him, “I don’t think you can make it as a writer. You’re not crazy enough.” So LB bore down and made himself totally nutso. But is that kind of thing still necessary?

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by Scott Barry Kaufman

Plato once noted that “creativity is a divine madness, a gift from gods.” Romantic notions of the link between mental illness and creativity still appear prominently in popular culture. But ever since scientists started formally investigating the link, there has been intense debate. Some of the most highly cited studies on the topic have been criticized on the grounds that they involve highly specialized samples with weak and inconsistent methodologies and a strong dependence on subjective and anecdotal accounts.

What has become much clearer, however, is that there is a real link between creativity and a number of traits and characteristics that are associated with mental illness. Once we leave the narrowed confines of the clinical setting and enter the larger general population, we see that mental disorders are far from categorical. Every single healthy human being lies somewhere on every psychopathology spectrum (e.g., schizophrenia, autism, mood disorders). What’s more, we each show substantial fluctuations on each of these dimensions each day, and across our lifespan. read article

Three Rules to Follow When You Live With Someone Who Works From Home

This one goes out to my significant other. Significantly:

pilbox.global.ssl.fastlyby Leda Marritz

When my husband, Tim, quit his job to develop his own game almost two years ago, I knew there would be challenges. For example, he was funding its development entirely with his own savings, with no guarantee of any kind of return—and I became the sole breadwinner in a city famous for its unaffordability. To save money, he decided to work from our small one-bedroom apartment, where his desk and our living room share the same space.

I definitely anticipated stress over money, long hours, and uncertainty, but I looked forward to the perks and flexibility of having someone at home during the day. But in reality? It was him working from home that caused much of the stress we experienced that first year. read article

How to Raise a Creative Child

Yeppers, TV writing fans, TVWriter™ has done it again. We’re bringing you something absolutely essential for your life – if your parents had read it 20+ years ago. This article still has some relevance, though. For one thing, it’ll rekindle all that vitriol you felt for your family. You know, the emotions that made you turn to writing. And for another, if you read and remember, then this definitely will help those strange little aliens known as your kids:

litte girl creatingby Dr. Judith Schlesinger

2014 year brought a delightful piece of serendipity to my mailbox. When Canadian Bernard Poulin read his local newspaper’s account of my book,The Insanity Hoax: Exposing the myth of the mad genius, he was moved to send me a copy of his own, Beyond Discouragement—CREATIVITY: How to raise a creative child(Classical Perceptions, 2010).

Poulin (POO-lin) is a successful and world-class professional (see his amazing artwork here).  Beyond Discouragement builds on four decades of his so-called “wonderings,” as well as his years of working with kids in remedial settings, and is illustrated with his own charming drawings.  It’s hardly news that self-publishing can restrict one’s audience—this book has been out for four years without acquiring a single amazon review. But it also enables authors to color outside the lines of political correctness without alarming any editors.  And so this one does. Frequently. read article

Productivity Tip – Make Your Writing Play, Not Work

Cuz when it becomes work instead of the thing you want – or need – to do more than anything else in the world, hey, you’re not gonna do it. Happens every time:

On-Treating-Writing-as-a-Form-of-Playby Eli Glasman

For years before my novel was published, I felt insecure about whether or not I was a ‘real’ writer. I don’t think this is a unique anxiety amongst unpublished authors and I responded to this anxiety in the way I think many people do: I romanticised the act of writing.

I told myself that the burden of writing fiction was thrust upon me and I had no choice but to sit each night and delve into the unknown to produce works of genius. Writing like this didn’t flow easily for me. And as a result, it was hard to read. The prose were pretentious and calculated. It was clear that everything I wrote was me begging the reader to think of me as a genius. read article