What I Accomplished: 100 Days of Morning Pages

This week I hit a 100-day streak of Morning Pages. If you haven’t heard of the morning pages they are the daily practice introduced by Julia Cameron in her book The Artists Way. The idea is that first thing every morning you sit down and stream-of-consciousness write 3 pages. It doesn’t matter what they are or what comes from them. It could be absolute nonsense. The goal is to clear your head and start the day off in the right headspace. It’s a practice I highly recommend to everyone. I can point to it as one of the most important parts of my daily routine.

What I’m Reminding Myself: Your Art Can’t be for Everyone

And it shouldn’t be. I think it’s easy to get lost in wanting your art to affect people. But the issue is that we think too globally. “People” is too vague. We need to be clear about who our art and who are change is for. It can’t be everyone. When we talk about “great art” we have to remember the context of that statement: it’s great art to someone. There’s no such thing as bad art, just wrong art for you. So before we go trying to mass market out ideas and stories lets start by considering who we want to change.

What I’m Pondering: The Fundamental concepts

Maybe it’s just me but the more I read the more I’ve started to wonder if there exists a single set of fundamental topics or ideas that every other area of learning or passion can be broken down into in one way or another. I don’t think I have a clear answer yet. Now to be clear I don’t mean topics like science or math. Those to me are a different kind of fundamental. I’m looking for the things that we can point to as a source for the way we talk about business, marketing, art, philosophy, belief, sociology, etc. The conceptual fundamental.

What I’m Reading: Purple Cow – Seth Godin

I’ve been burning through Godin’s books these past few months (he’s written 23!) and with each one, I gain some new insight into how marketing (storytelling) is one of the most influential things we have at our disposal. Purple Cow is Godin’s dive into the product side of marketing. He argues (quite convincingly) that today’s society has no tolerance for the mild. The days of mediocre products backed by stellar marketing have passed. The products themselves (and our ideas) must now be as remarkable as the marketing that drives them. These are our purple cows.