Vol. 5: Custom Fit Creativity

A weekly newsletter on our modern Renaissance, the issues and ideas driving today's creative work.

Embrace your personal operating system.

From my Substack,?Renaissance Plan.?Read the full article here.

I am a romantic when it comes to creative work. Perhaps a bit too much of a romantic. I wrote and published a book to propose to my wife, with the simple internal creative brief “I want to live in a romantic comedy.” And so I have done my best writing, or at least I’ve?felt the best while writing, in environments that feel almost cinematic.

I love coffee shops in Brooklyn, and have spent countless days and hours sitting in hotel lobbies working while watching the people come and go, imagining their stories, personalities, and quirks. I don’t like neat spaces, in college I would take over entire group meeting rooms to write papers, printing out notes and research documents and throwing them around the floor and walls as I built the assignment of the day.

It turns out, there is some scientific evidence to back my particular flavor of creative work. People enjoy working in coffee shops (it’s a real concept known as “the coffee shop effect”) because it offers the perfect amount of ambient noise to create “cognitive disfluency.” That is, enough noise to distract your wandering mind from its own devices, but not too much that your focus drifts towards an individual conversation or person. It creates tunnel-vision that enables you to focus on your creative pursuit. I’m a morning person, and can’t share a cohesive thought past 9pm.

Still, in an era of bio-hacking, and grind culture, and talking heads that claim to have all of the secrets to making you perform at your absolute highest capacity, it is important to point out that none of the habits that help me be creative may work for you. I have friends who need complete silence at home to work. Some who cannot start being productive until their work area and home are completely neat and tidy. Others who like to sleep in but can pull all-nighters like we did in college well into their adult years. The reality is that we all have different operating systems, the mental and physical stimuli that optimizes my creative output might be entirely differentiated from yours. And, that’s entirely ok.

When I wrote my book on creativity, the outline shifted from trying to build a blueprint of behaviors that could drive creative output to a blueprint of?values and ideas?that would help welcome in your own personal creative mindset. Still, it’s really hard to identify those habits and replicate them. If you struggle with getting into a creative rhythm, start by asking yourself one simple question:?when do you feel most creative?

Again, forget output. Forget the specific task. You may not?feel?the most creative when you are doing the most “important” creative task on your plate. You might feel most creative while on a walk, or while watching musicians busk on the boardwalk, or while reading a book of fiction before bed each night. Whatever that feeling is, capture it and use it to your advantage. If reading is your creative trigger, then sit and read 20 pages before the next time you need to write, or present an idea at work, or brainstorm a pitch for a new client.

It must also be said that our operating systems can change over the course of our lives and our careers. You may not have access to the same kind of environment as you once did, and you may need to adapt. You may grow and change and the things that inspired you previously no longer do. Keeping tabs on how our minds and bodies work together over time is critical to finding and maintaining habits that work.

I read a post by Tom Goodwin yesterday on the ongoing battle between in-office and remote work. And in it, he voiced something that has been gnawing at me for a while too.

“Meanwhile it strikes me, and I've always felt I should keep quiet about this, there is one heck of a lot of trauma from that time that people keep inside them. I see it and hear about it all of the time. We've never really been able to draw a line under it and move on. We're in collective denial. One day it would be good if it was OK to talk about it.”

In a post-COVID world, so much of our lives and the way we see the world has changed. And we have changed as a result. Over the past year, I have had the chance to travel to many creativity and design festivals and community meet ups, and I always have the same two takeaways from talking to creative people:

1. They are enormously motivated to be together again and to produce amazing work.
2. They are all kind of f*cked up.

Collectively, the creative community is wrestling with the long-term effects of a trauma that both touched society and each of us individually. The past few years have lit a fire under us to?be creative, while also rewiring our operating systems in ways we can only begin to imagine.

Creativity has always and will always be inextricably tied to our identities. It is the expression of both our external and personal experiences fusing together. And so it would be entirely impossible for anyone to tell you (including me, maybe especially me) how to live a creative life.

The best we can do is help you find new ways of thinking so that you are more apt to notice when your own brand of creativity finds you. You have your own personal operating system, and that is what makes you beautiful. Embrace what makes you, you, and you’ll be well on your way to realizing your creative potential.

Read the full article and subscribe?here.

Community thoughts.

Worth reading: Aristotle's 10 Rules for a Good Life.

Living a creative life and living a good life aren't all that different from one another in my biased opinion. And this week, author and professor Arthur C. Brooks wrote a lovely article in The Atlantic revisiting 10 rules for getting there from the famed philosopher Aristotle. One of these rules that stood out for me was "truthfulness about yourself." Aristotle, says Brooks, argued against both being overly-boastful (full of oneself) as well as being too self-deprecating (hard on oneself). I'm sure I've waded into both territories at various times in my life, this was a good reminder to stay centered, and that we can aspire to be better while also being kind to ourselves.

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On the road again: Brand Talks Chicago on September 20th.

This fall, I'm excited to be back on the road meeting with and sharing ideas with the creative and design community. First up, I'll be MC'ing a special event hosted by Monotype called Brand Talks. Taking place in Chicago on September 20th, the event is catered to designers, brand leaders, and creatives - featuring content from amazing speakers and networking in a great location. If you are in the area, please register here - I'd love to see you.

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Ingredients for Building a Modern Brand: SXSW PanelPicker shameless plug.

I'm also super excited to be planning some community engagement at SXSW 2024 in Austin on behalf of Monotype. We've built an amazing panel with some of our key partners Canva , Getty Images , and Pantone , discussing the changing role of design and how creative assets and technology are coming together to build brands for the future.

The panel is now live for voting until August 20th. If you'll be there, please vote so we can bring this group to the stage. The panelists we've secured represent an amazing cross-section of the community.

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Wishing you a creative week ahead!