Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
Here is an interesting excerpt from an interview with Jennifer Mueller and Shankar Vedantam, author of The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and …
I stumbled across Anne Lamott’s beautiful Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Lamott’s advice is down to earth, real, and void of any pretentiousness. In fact, it’s …
Kirby Ferguson is a New York based filmmaker who also writes. He’s also the man behind the Everything is a Remix video series, which is about influence and appropriation in the creative process. …
Scott Adams, the famous creator of Dilbert, has made a very good living by understanding and revealing human psychology. In How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Adams shares “the …
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” — Seneca *** We’ve entered a new phase of self-invention. Thanks in large part to technology and the pace of the modern …
Via Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights (Kindle) To improve performance, we need to do two things. The down arrow is what we have to reduce, errors. The up arrow is …
In 1936 Graham Wallas, co-founder of the London School of Economics, published The Art of Thought, outlining the four stages of the creative process. This pre-dates, by at least a decade, James …
In the foreword to James Webb Young’s book, A Technique for Producing Ideas, Keith Reinhard asks, “How can a book first published in the 1940s be important to today’s creative people …
What can we learn from the working habits of famous writers, artists, and composers? And how did they find time each day to do their work? After reading Mason Currey’s fantastic book, Daily …
We know one of the biggest things you can do to improve your working habits is switch creative work first and reactive work, like replying to emails, later in the day. That’s easy to say, but …
In an increasingly interconnected world, finding focus and enabling time to do work is becoming harder and harder. Demands are outstripping our capacity at an alarming rate. It’s time to start …
In his book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey explores Philip Roth. Roth is full of insight. His comments on writing, taken from Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker, stuck with me. …
Mason Currey’s recently published Daily Rituals: How Artists Work mentioned the routines, quirks, and rituals of plenty of creative minds—novelists, painters, poets, philosophers, filmmakers, …
I know it sounds strange but I love learning about how people go about creating things. So you can imagine my delight when I came across Mason Currey’s new book Daily Rituals, which describes …
In his book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves, Dan Ariely attempts to answer the question: “is dishonesty largely restricted to a few bad apples or is …
Just because you see does not mean you observe. The difference between seeing and observing is fundamental to many aspects of life. Observation is more than simply seeing something, but rather a …