7 Things That Made Me Stop And Think This Week.

Creative Sparks: #9

Joshua Poh
Sep 2, 2018 · 6 min read

I’m writing this from Batam, Indonesia on a weekend getaway.

I’m learning of the value of:

  • Weekends where the only thing on the agenda is to curl up in bed with a steaming cup of tea, swaddled in blankets like and paperback in hand
  • Revisiting the feeling of being sucked into a paperback book, your every fiber yearning to figure out whodunit? What’s going on? What’s going to happen next? (Book in question is The Girl On The Train)
  • Unplugging from the rest of society does wonders for your mind and body

On to this week’s stories:

1. Take A Depth Year, Raptitude

With the vast amounts of knowledge available to us now, learning new skills has never been easier.

Unfortunately, it’s also easier to bounce from one pursuit to another, abandoning a pursuit when the going gets tough.

I wonder if anyone is like me. I want to learn anything and everything. I go “oh wow that looks interesting. I then Google everything on that topic, maybe picking up a book or two.

But I have a problem.

I don’t stick with it long enough for it to become a viable skill. And you NEED to spend time honing your craft to become competent at a skill. You need to suck and get through the sucky feeling to get great.

And it’s easier to find something new and feel that all-familiar buzz than persevering through the difficult or boring parts of your existing pursuits.

David Cain from Raptitude poses a compelling experiment: take a whole year in which you don’t start anything new or acquire any new possessions you don’t need. Instead, you have to find the value in what you already own or what you’ve already started.

2. The power of doing nothing at all by Aytekin Tank

Aytekin hit it out of the park with this one.

Easy-to-understand fable storytelling as analogy? Check

Vulnerable personal sharing? Check

Universal takeaway and ‘here’s what to do next’ for your audience? Check

Historical references? Check?

And my favourite part — even though it was published on his company blog, there’s no mention whatsoever to his product’s capabilities or trying to sell you something.

This is ‘content marketing’ at it’s finest.

Once you put all these together, it’s easy to see why this story has amassed a whooping 101k claps on Medium.

3. Via Negativa by Adrian Zumbrunnen

Via Negativa, from Latin, the negative way, is a process in which you reduce an idea to its essence through the process of continuous elimination.

Adrian Zumbrunnen’s incredible piece on how great design is about focusing on the essentials made me think this question: “how do you create something that is functional, is aesthetically pleasing and still simple to use”?

If something is unnecessarily complex, not given any semblance of negative space to breathe or stuffed to the brim with features and information — just like this sentence, does it make it a great sentence?

Instead of sticking everything in your product, this piece reminds me of the virtues of careful editing and letting your creative products breathe.

4. In Praise Of Editing, Geoffrey Keating writing on the Intercom blog

Ah, the providential red pen of the editor, every writer’s love-it-or-hate-it presence in their life.

Once a word or sentence is committed on paper, we feel a personal attachment to them. We hate being told to remove sentences from our work that we’ve worked so hard to create or worse still, rewrite a portion altogether.

Editing is all about removing everything in the way of you communicating your point across.

“The best editors serve as proxies for readers. They understand what those readers need and appreciate, but are able to help writers do what is necessary to reach them.”

5. The New York Public Library Is Bringing Real Stories to Your Instagram Stories, Electric Literature

Would you like to read a book on your Instagram Stories?

Well, now you can.

The New York Public Library (Instagram @nypl) is releasing classics on their Instagram account to be read through Instagram Stories.

This is a fantastic concept for ‘repurposing content’ — designing images specifically for Instagram Stories complete with a place to put your thumb as you read. From the perspective of getting people to read classics, I am astounded by the idea.

6. In Defense of Heavy Instagram Usage by Taylor Coil

Instagrammers are often slammed as being superficial or narcissistic, but is that really all it is to them?

This story acts as a counterpoint to an essay I shared in a previous edition earlier (The Instagram Generation by Zander Nethercutt)

In this lively transcript of a long-distance conversation, Taylor and Georgette dissect the reasons why we spend so much time on Instagram.

As with all other social media efforts, maybe it all boils down to what we’re trying to achieve with the platform. Is it to share moments from your life you want to remember with your network?

“I think we’ve been somewhat conditioned as a generation (society?) to see social media as bad for us, as toxic to our personalities, as destructive rather than formative. I challenge that assumption — obviously, given the topic of this conversation — but I can’t pretend that conditioning doesn’t impact me. I’m supposed to be spending less time on my phone, because that’s what we’re told we’re supposed to want to do.”

7. A Tale of Two Websites by Sun-Li Beatteay

“Take time to appreciate how much you’ve learned”.

Learning a skill takes time. And you need to appreciate how far you’ve come.

Sun-Li Beatteay writes a reflective piece about his process of building two separate websites; one as a novice and one with more experience under his belt.

“The real reason is, I want to emphasize the importance of self-reflection. I was hesitant to update my wife’s site, because I hadn’t realized how much I had grown. It’s hard to see the amount you progress on a day-to-day basis.

Knowledge accumulates inch-by-inch. But by looking back over a long period of time, those inches become leaps and bounds. In Japanese culture, this idea of small daily improvements is known as “kaizen”.

Take time to appreciate where you’ve come from, what you’ve learned thus far and how far you’ve come. This keeps you anchored when times feel slow or when you feel like you haven’t progressed much.

Each week, I compile 7 articles, videos or other thoughts from books and write out my thoughts on them. Want to get them as they’re released? Follow the publication! You can have a look at the previous editions here.

Creative Sparks by Joshua Poh

I read and review things that make me stop and think

Joshua Poh

Written by

Startup Marketer, Photographs Life, Documenting my journey of reading and writing to learn more about the world and myself.

Creative Sparks by Joshua Poh

I read and review things that make me stop and think

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