Things I Learned from Jake Nickell’s Creative Mornings Session

I have yet more Creative Mornings notes. These are from Jake Nickell’s talk about the fundamental human need to make things.

• You’re not just goofing off on your computer in your spare time for fun. You’re fulfilling a fundamental human need.
• Many amazing companies exist today just because someone followed a passion and joy for making something.
• Learn to do things by doing them. Have curiosity and follow it by digging in and working on it.
• You won’t know how to do everything. Embrace it and learn.
• Stick your nose in things you shouldn’t, put yourself in uncomfortable situations, and you will learn.
• Make unintended consequences. You never know what byproducts you’ll make.
• Do it for yourself. Have something that you do in your life that you’re good at. Don’t just consume. You don’t want your kids to remember you one day by saying that you were really good at watching Youtube Videos
• Ground yourself by making things by hand. Get connected to real materials and really using your hands to do something.
• Doodle, sketch, tinker. Get ideas out of your head. Built prototypes. Build things, even if they’re not perfect or totally thought out. Put things to paper. Vet out bad ideas.
• You don’t have to have the whole thing thought out. Start and let it flow from there. You don’t need a master plan before you can start tinkering with something...just start.
• Make something every day, it’s a good habit to get into.
• Make friends with people. Make things with them. This isn’t just meeting someone and starting a company on a whim. Just make friends, make things, and share those things with your friends. That’s how it begins, you don’t have to be so serious about everything.
• Get in a rhythm of making things and it will fuel itself. Get on a roll. Get in a rhythm of creating.
• With the Internet, you have a place to put what you make. Don’t just let it sit and collect dust, put it out there to be seen by the world.
• Want to keep things from stagnating in your life? Make something. It’s not just fun, it can actually become your life.
• We all want to make cool and great things together.
• It’s okay if something starts ugly. You have to be confident that you can figure out things as you go.
• Solve problems once they’re problems, not before that. It’s more important to get started on something than to be paralyzed by problems you don’t have to even face yet.

Things I Learned from Jason Fried’s Creative Mornings Session

I love Creative Mornings. Creative Mornings is a monthly lecture series for creative-type folks. They take place all over the world, and they’re all available on Vimeo for free. That means you have no excuse not to watch them.

I wrote down some notes from Jason Fried’s talk a few months ago, and then never published them because I’m a wimp and second guess everything I want to put on this site. So without further adieu, here are my notes. You should go watch this and take your own notes too. Better yet, find a way to put some of these excellent ideas into action.

• Your problems are not unique. Scratching your own itch and solving those problems, solves it for everyone else who faces the same thing. Also, when your product solves your own problems you know whether or not it’s good.
• When you fund your own company and work and rely on yourself, no one else can tell you what to do.
• Self-initiated projects show if it’s just a job or part of your life. They show if you really enjoy what you do.
• Interrupting someone says that what you have to say to them is more important than what they are working on.
• Treat your office like a library. Create an environment where you can learn and get things done.
• You don’t have a craftsman who builds furniture and hones his craft for 30 years, and then he goes and manages other craftsman doing the same thing. The same should be true for your company and your workers.
• When people are happier, they’re going to do better work
• Implementing REWORK in a corporate setting: Get projects done using the methodology and let others take notice.
• Working in a corporate environment is okay. If you like it stay; if you don’t work somewhere else.
• When you say no, say no early. No one wants to work on something for 3 months and then kill it. No is No to one thing; Yes is No to a lot of things.
• Recognize your creative times and utilize them wisely.
• When you work on something you don’t like, it’s not going to be any good.
• If you have a unique point of view, and do something in a different way, you can handle the competition.
• Build something that solves problems, not something that meets specs.
• Less is always an option.

BarCamp 2011 and Pushing Things Out the Door

This week I gave myself a personal challenge: Finally launch a new version of this site, moving over some posts from my tumblog in the process, and start writing again. And now here I am, a couple of hours of work later, and there is still work to do. I’m okay with that; I would rather iterate and work on something real than keep this bottled up and delay getting it out the door.

Next I will chronicle my Barcamp experience, either through sketch notes or an article. And either way, it will be posted here as I continue refining and working. There are still several things that need to be finished, but it’s running and alive. I hope you enjoy, imaginary person to whom I am writing.

It’s Not the Tools

In my junior year of college I took a watercolor class. People talked about two main things concerning this class. One was the teacher, an extremely skilled Chinese man with an awesome goatee, who some students feared and some students loved. The other was the cost of all the materials you needed for class: paint and brushes and paper, among other things. It was one of the most expensive courses to take.

I remember the lecture that our teacher gave us that first day of class, one that he referred to for the rest of the course. The crux of it was this: even though we invested in good tools for our painting, the tools themselves would not make our painting better. “The brush will only do what you make it do. You are in control of the brush, right? The brush is not in control of you?” If ever someone struggled with getting the technique correct, he would remind us sarcastically and humorously, and also right on point,“Oh, it must be something wrong with your brush. That’s why you can’t do it.”

It was hard to swallow for some people (I always thought it was kind of funny, even though I was terrible at watercolor), but this statement was simple and true. You control your tools. Your tools themselves will not make you better at what you do. You can have the most exquisitely made paint brush in the world, but it won’t make you a good painter. I do believe in buying good tools, and I think that quality in your tools is important—a computer that constantly crashes will get in the way of your work—however, they will not in themselves make you better. That is up to you.

Likewise, learning how to make cooler textures in Photoshop won’t make you a better designer, and buying a Mac and TextMate won’t make you a better programmer. Your ability to learn new things, to think critically about what you do and who you are, and to do things you already know better and better are what counts. Regardless of your craft, your skill rests in your own hands.