realising your creative potential
Feeling totally (or maybe just a bit) drained and out of creative ideas? Perhaps you need to take a break, or make time for some creative input. Why not take a micro-sabbatical? You’ll find the reasoning behind it and some practical ways to have one by reading a great post by Bradley J Moore called Six Ways to Take a Micro-Sabbatical.
I’m off for a micro… care to join me?
There are times when we feel like a total and utter creative failure. Okay, confession time, I do. I don’t know about you but I am confident that some of you feel the same.
We may spend hours, day or even weeks being creative only to give up near the end, with feelings of inadequacy. The work that we have produced, despite the praise of our peers and friends, is deemed by us alone as complete rubbish. Our creative efforts are consigned at best to a hidden folder on Flickr and at worst to the delete button or the bin.
We are our own worst enemies. We go further than simply being critical of our work, we metaphorically and sometimes literally, tear it apart… and ourselves along the way too. But, and here it the big but, there is no reason to be doing this.
There is a great article at the Harvard Business Review that looks at managing your inner critic. While the article is aimed to help those in a business environment, the practicalities for dealing with this inner critic are transferable.
So, instead of ripping your work and yourself to shreds, have a read of the article below.
How to Manage Your Inner Critic – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review
And, over at Leo’s Zen Habits there is another post offering some similar advice, so I thought I’d add that here too.The Abundance Blog lives up to its name with this list of 17 creative resource links. They are aimed at getting the right (creative) side of the brain going. There is pretty much something for everyone in the list, so enjoy.
17 Resources to Awaken Your Right Brain – Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online
Here’s a great little apllication to help with learning guitar chords. It has a nice and simple layout, and with the added sound you can even see how close you’re getting to the actual chord when you attempt it.
There is a wonderful, simple post over at White Hot Truth by Danielle LaPorte. It claims that there are 11 productivity tips that creative types already know. Whilst this may be true, I also think that it is a list of 11 tips that we could all do with being reminded of.
So go, take a look and make sure that you all 11 are inhabiting somewhere in your creative world.
There’s something happening in the bird world that we should take note of. No, I’m not talking about the destruction of the rain forests and the extinction of exotic species, that’s beyond the remit of this blog. I’m talking about Aviary.
Aviary provides a suite of online applications for a growing number of your creative needs. The first applications were image based, photo editing and vector image creation. But now they have moved into audio editing.
Myna, is the latest edition to Aviary. It is a reasonably specced audio editor. You can import or record audio onto separate tracks before mixing away and rendering your final audio creation.
To see exactly what it is capable of have a look at the video below and then let your creativity run free.
Need to try out a quick tune but don’t have your USB keyboard with you?
Then pop along to kisstunes. This little app turns your computer keybaord into a music keyboard at the load of an app.
It can even record what you play! What more do you need when the inspiration strikes.
An amazing online colour /color tool app can be found at colorschemedesigner.com .
The tool is great for trying out what colours work well. It is simple to use, free and does exactly what it says on the URL.
Found this via Moleskinerie and had to share it. The YouTube blurb has the following to say:
Radiolab presents: Moments by Will Hoffman. This film is a celebration of life that was inspired by David Eagleman’s book, Sum.
Over recent years I think I have signed up to each and every task management tool that has come online. They are all pretty good and to be honest not too much difference in the way they work. Have goal / project and create some to do / next actions for it et voila.
So when I saw another task management tool that was on the net I thought I needed that like a hole in my head. The Big Picture is the tool and like all the rest it works in pretty much the same way. Create a goal and then assign some tasks and actions etc.
But
The Big Picture does this in a wonderful, visual way, and is totally dragable. It is a breath of fresh air in a pretty stagnant development arena. I love it. I can’t really explain it so check out the video below. And while you’re off doing that I am going to get the obviously needed hole in my head.
The slight negatives at the moment are:
But these are slight negatives. Now to plan my creative future…