Retirees’ Creative Reinvention Day 17: Stay on task…

Overestimating my ability to handle multiple projects…a major fault

Srini Rao has long been a go-to resource for advice and inspiration. This is one of my favorite posts from unmistakeablecreative.com.

Love the wrinkled undershirt look…but hey! He’s sticking with his schedule!

How to Never Miss a Day of Creative Work

Highlights:

1. “Take the minimal viable action of sitting down at your desk…”

2. “Reduce the scope, but stick to the schedule.”

3. “It’s better to lower your standards and actually follow through…”

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Thanks for reading and stay vigilant for opportunities
to stretch and flex those creative muscles.

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Retirees’ Creative Reinvention Day 16: As you’re learning, you’re teaching.

More from Show Your Work **by Austin Kleon.

Fellow Retirees: Reframe your standing as a ‘creative’. We are a few among the many, all at different stages.

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Thanks for reading and stay vigilant for opportunities
to stretch and flex those creative muscles.

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** I’m mixing in different links to Austin K so they don’t all lead to a ‘buy’ page. Note: I just value the guy’s work. Not making a dime off the links.

Retirees’ Creative Reinvention Day 15: We’re not alone.

More from Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.

Fellow Retirees: Reframe your standing as a ‘creative’. We are a few among the many, all at different stages.

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Thanks for reading and stay vigilant for opportunities
to stretch and flex those creative muscles.

 

Retirees’ Creative Reinvention Day 14: Embrace your amateurism…

Still with the ‘you’ve made a decision to create‘ thread, through the week, I’ll be sharing quotes from Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.

Fellow Retirees: What do we have to lose?

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Thanks for reading and stay vigilant for opportunities
to stretch and flex those creative muscles.

 

Retirees’ Creative Reinvention Day 13: And once you’ve made that decision…

In my last post, I explored, with the help of Jon Acuff, the decision creators must make every day.

Now that you’ve made a decision to create [and possibly to share some of your work], you might saunter further into some unexplored, or at least dormant, traits.

Dani Shapiro, author of Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life,  says: [Note: For every mention of writing, plug in your own creative endeavor.]

“The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail — not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime. “Ever tried, ever failed,” Samuel Beckett once wrote. “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It requires what the great editor Ted Solotoroff once called endurability.”

For a more complete discussion, click on over to Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings.

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Thanks for reading and stay vigilant for opportunities to stretch your and flex those creative muscles.

 

Retirees’ Creative Reinvention Day 12: Make a decision…

Jon Acuff, author of Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done, recently posted about a decision we make every day. He uses a stage–the place where we step forward–as his metaphor.

Two of his main points:

• “Your stage might be different, but we all have one…Maybe for you it’s sending an email to a literary agent.”

• “The exit is easier. It’s faster and more comfortable and a lot safer.”

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Thanks for reading and stay vigilant for opportunities to stretch your and flex those creative muscles.

 

Retirees’ Creative Reinvention Day 11: Move past imperfection.

This post is especially relevant to us as beginners in our creative pursuits.

I like this medium.com post by Thomas Oppong.

Title: Make Life Easier on Yourself by Accepting “Good Enough.” Don’t Pursue Perfection, Pursue Progress

Highlights:

— “In other words, instead of pushing yourself to an impossible “perfect,” and therefore getting nowhere, accept “good.”

— “Perfection is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough…”

— “The real world doesn’t reward perfectionists.
It rewards people who get things done.”

Stick with this post for the other valuable quotes from smart people like Brené Brown and Seth Godin.

 

View at Medium.com

 

Retirees’ Creative Reinvention Day 10: Laugh at yourself along the way.

Quote of the day:

“After a few more minutes of daydreaming about how fabulous I could become, I look down at the heading on my paper: Janey’s Reinvention Plan. It appears lonely at the top of the page. I should probably add some bullets beneath, but I’ve never been much of a list maker.”
― J.C. Patrick, The Reinvention of Janey

Thanks for reading and stay vigilant for opportunities to stretch your thinking.

 

Retirees’ Creative Reinvention Day 9: Collaboration = ‘scenius’.

Yesterday, I referred to Austin Kleon as a creative touchstone.

Above is a page of his book Show Your Work, condensed by way of a blackout poem, a technique he uses and unabashedly ‘stole’. [See his book Steal Like An Artist.] The first draft of the blackout poem was a mess and I later posted a cleaner version, but at that moment an hour ago, I wanted to get something out there. So I thought, ‘What the hey?’ [should it be ‘What the hay’?…and does it or does it not need a question mark? We creative retirees…such a tortured bunch.]

This is one of my favorite pages in Show Your Work and it speaks to my post about collaboration.

Thanks for reading and stay vigilant for opportunities to stretch your thinking.

 

Retirees’ Creative Reinvention Day 8: Find Your Creative Touchstones

Yesterday, I shared a quote from Albert Einstein about the power of irrational thinking.

In my search for a resource to support that quote, I ran across How to Become More Creative and Free Your Mind by Chad Grills.

Sure, I’ve heard and tried some of these techniques and strategies, but Grills does such a nice job of reframing these ideas, and adding new notions, that I immediately shared it with two groups and emailed it to three different accounts.

Along with books from Austin Kleon and Steven Pressfield, I would have to classify this post as a ‘creative touchstone’, a go-to resource I can return to for inspiration.

What are your creative touchstones? And if you don’t have any, launch a full-scale hunt right now! [Or at least after coffee and decadent treat.]

Thanks for reading and stay vigilant for opportunities to stretch your thinking.