When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.

The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

I spent my remaining time off drawing, writing, and thinking; the same way in which I’d hope to spend a generative sabbatical. I slowed down and realized that what I had been working on, although hard, was exactly the right thing. Once I got away from the grind and back in touch with my own voice, I realized that I still liked myself and my job, and that what I needed was just a small note of self-appreciation.

It’s six months later. I’m not on a sabbatical as I write these lines. But I’ve held on to much of the goodness I found back then, such as trying to incorporate my natural rhythm into my work tasks and keeping the passion for the subject matter at the forefront of whatever I do. Yet I long for another sabbatical, a longer one or more frequent short ones. Part of me wonders whether, if I took an extended generative sabbatical, I would discover some other, deeper, better passion … one that I suspect but can’t confirm while embedded in the place I’ve chosen. For all these reasons, I say the purpose of any sabbatical is to press our boundaries, reconnect our inner narratives, and ask ourselves the dangerous questions—all the while adding quality to our lives… .”

Everything that happens to me is usable. Everything feeds into creativity, but you need to be prepare, to see it, to retain it and to use it. You need to get ready to create.

No one starts a creative project without a certain amount of fear. Write your fears down and be as specific as possible about them. Finally, stare them down, look at them in the eye and shake them down. Create a ritual; buy a new notebook, clean the apartment, buy a bottle of wine… A habit becomes a rituals, and rituals have this spiritual component, where the faith invested in them converts them into an act that provides comfort and strength.

Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. You’re never lonely when your mind is engage in playing with ideas, push them around, make them your companion.

Immerse your self in the details of your work, and at the same time step back to scan the work, don’t get so involve that you lose what you’re trying to say.

Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It’s how we interpret what we remember. Metaphor transforms the strange into the familiar.

Write down the goal for every creative project. That way you can always go back that anchor, to remind you of what you were thinking at the beginning if and when you lose your way.

Every point in the creative process is a good time to start something, to take it from there into anywhere it goes. Every step is a potential new beginning.

The first steps of the creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful. These moments are not pretty, but there is a way to get to something of value: Scratching. The way you scratch a lottery ticket, you dig through everything to find something. Ideas come upon you mysteriously, unbidden. Scratching is where creativity begins. it is the moment where your ideas first take flight and begin to defy gravity.

I really like this definition of creativity.

Henry James said that genius is the act of perceiving similarity among disparate things.

It implies that the wider your range of interest, the more connections you can make between disparate things.

Learn, connect, create, execute.

Make it a habit.

Philip Graham: “Oh, I’m much more relaxed about the whole process than I used to be. Basically, all that matters is what appears on the page, I don’t worry so much anymore about publishing schedules. I’m primarily interested in the trial and error of forging the patterns of my imagination’s fingerprint; the grimy marks it may leave on the world comes later.”