Surround Yourself with Diversity & Your Creative Potential will Accelerate

Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career.

Chapter 3: Cultivating Relationships

Jocelyn K. Glei

In this chapter of “Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career,” I read about how to build collaborative alliances and networks that will enrich my work.  “Put simply, opportunities flow through people.  If you want a job, what you need is someone to hire you.  If you want capital to start a business, what you need is an investor.  If you want to sell a product, what you need is a customer.  At every stage in our careers, whatever level of opportunity or growth we seek, we depend on relationships to drive us forward” (Glei 129).

“To achieve all that we’re capable of, we must enlist a group of allies to accompany us on our journey, empower our coworkers and clients to give us honest feedback, build collaborative teams with an eye toward fresh perspectives, and tend to our network of acquaintances with generosity and authenticity” (129).  Many creative people see their work as primarily an individual endeavor, but this chapter taught me that even though in the creative realm usually the best work often reflects a strong individual vision rather than a collective one, that if this approach is followed too closely, then we can miss out on valuable help that can advance our work.

The key takeaways that I got from this chapter were tips on how to work with people when things are going wrong, as they inevitably will, and how to manage it because “everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves,” a quote by Carl Jung.  Don’t go it alone by seeking out people who you can trust and ask for help, and who will hold you accountable, create social contracts by addressing “what could go wrong in a creative relationship up front” so then “when a conflict does arise, you’ve created a comfortable space for talking about it,” trust in generosity, ask and you shall receive, know that cross-pollination begets creativity and “try to assemble creative teams that include both veteran collaborators and newbies” because diversity accelerates your creative potential, and act like a master builder, not a master mind (181).  One point that I really liked was to “focus on how you can help others, and lasting connections will come.  The true spirit of networking should be generosity, not obligation” (181).

“In a world of collaborative creation, whom we surround ourselves with dictates how much we can achieve” (129).

Excellence: not an act, but a habit.

Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind.

Chapter 1: Building A Rock-Solid Routine

Jocelyn K. Glei

In this chapter of “Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind,” I read about how to give structure, rhythm, and purpose to my daily work.  A quote that I came across that stuck with me is “We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” (39).  This quote is by Aristotle and I really love it.  It reminds me that in order to get your tasks done, you need to work at it repeatedly and really hone in on your creative practice.  “Cultivating a daily practice is a necessary prerequisite to achieving great things” (Godin 41).

The hardest part about getting a daily routine right is that some people have broken strategies.  There are a lot of talented folks who are not succeeding the way that they want to because of this.  Seth Godin thinks that “the strategy is to have a practice, and what it means to have a practice is to regularly and reliably do the work in a habitual way” (42).

“There are many ways you can signify to yourself that you are doing your practice.  For example, some people wear a white lab coat or a particular pair of glasses, or always work in a specific place—in doing these things, they are professionalizing their art” (42).  This goes along with my strategy, which is to wake up at a reasonably early hour (for me this means sometime before noon—sooooo 11:45am, because if I wake up after noon then my day is done...  I have officially let my laziness take over the possibility of getting anything productive done that day and I most likely won’t even move from bed), I must get a coffee, and go to the library or the IDD lab.  I need to be in a quiet setting, where I can dedicate my focus to my work and not conversations with friends or where I can avoid people watching every time a human being walks by a window that I might be sitting at in the caf or student center, for example.  I also like the big screens in the library or IDD lab where I can view all of my work in a more organized and visible way, as opposed to on my 13” Mac laptop screen.  My strategy jump-starts my creativity by establishing this routine as my “associative triggers.”

The key takeaways from this chapter on how to build a rock-solid routine are to put great work before everything else, jump-start your creativity by establishing “associative triggers—such as listening to the same music or arranging your desk in a certain way—that tell your mind it’s time to get down to work,” feel the frequency by committing to working on your project at consistent intervals—“ideally every day—to build creative muscle and momentum over time,” pulse and pause by working hard and then renewing your energy by taking breaks in between working bursts, get lonely, and to not wait for moods by showing up, whether you feel inspired or not (Glei 65).

Finding Focus in a Distracted World

Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind

Chapter 2: Finding Focus in a Distracted World

Jocelyn K. Glei

In this chapter of “Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind,” I read about how to find focus amidst all of the distractions that we have in our world today and more importantly how to hone my attention to produce work that really matters.

In the past few decades that I have grown up, the amount of information that we are confronted with on a daily basis has grown exponentially.  “Open-plan offices have brought the buzz of other people’s activities into our workspaces.  The Internet has provided an infinite source of distraction right inside our primary workstation—the computer.  And smartphones have made the allure of new information available anytime, anywhere” (Glei 69).

I find this problem to be totally apparent in my every day life as well.  Every time that I am on the computer trying to get a project done, create design work, or work on a paper, for example, I time and time again find myself procrastinating on Facebook scrolling through some girl who I haven’t talked to in year’s family vacation albums or scrolling through endless addicting BuzzFeed posts on cute goats.  It is a real problem!  Also, my mom told me last month that we are now known as “the generation in their palms,” referring to the fact that we cannot keep our heads out of our palms, constantly checking our smartphones and never bothering to look away and notice what is going on in the real world.  We never bother to stop for a second, take a breath, and actually see the leaves growing on the trees!  I constantly am caught up in other people’s lives or posts, games, pictures, articles, etc. that I have found that are totally irrelevant to me.  The entire point of the invention of these apps or websites is to get people addicted to them and in hopes that they will spend and rack up countless hours a day on their platform.  It is all a trap that I have completely fallen for.

Yet today in our society, and especially in the design world, you are sort of required to keep up on all portals of the internet, be on top of your social media game, and know how the design world and its technology is constantly changing.  If you look away for too long, you will feel totally out of the loop.  In fact at my internship this summer on the Social Media team at an advertising agency, it was part of your job to constantly patrol social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google +, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc.  Up until then, I had never even created a Pinterest account because I just knew that I would become addicted to it and spend countless hours procrastinating on the platform instead of doing something productive.  However, at this internship they made me make an account so I could surf and explore the different pages and see what was trending so I could help come up with ideas of how to better brand and sell our accounts on these platforms.  In the end, I discovered that Pinterest, for example, was actually an awesome tool when it comes to designing and advertising your brand.  Yes, some time on this platform may be used procrastinating, but I actually find that I spent a lot of the time on this platform well spent by researching and finding inspiration from other users.

So obviously, I need some help.  In this chapter I learned how “amid this constant surge of information, attention has become our most precious asset.  To spend it wisely, we must develop a better understanding of how temptation works on our brains, cultivate new strategies for enhancing our self-control, and carve out time to truly focus on big, creative tasks (69).

The key takeaways from this chapter were to defend your creative time, focus when you’re fresh, kill the background noise (by turning off your phone, email, and any apps unrelated to your task!), make progress visible, give your brain a break, and tap into transitional moments.  “Take a break from checking your smartphone during transitional moments, and open yourself up to opportunity and serendipity” (116).

“In a world filled with distraction, attention is our competitive advantage.  Look at each day as a challenge—and an opportunity—to keep your eye on the prize” (69).