creative maverick

Melissa Pierce is what I would call a Player. She is making a film called Life in Perpetual Beta about making life up as you go along - and she’s making it up as she goes along. She has no real experience of film making and I don’t think she knows exactly where the film [...]

Chris Guillebeau makes a full-time living from his blog The Art of Non Conformity while travelling the world on his mission to visit every country on Earth. He very kindly agreed to be interviewed for my book “Screw Work, Let’s Play” and share a little of what’s made his lifestyle possible.
Chris, how do you answer [...]

Derek Sivers is a remarkable guy. He’s best known as the founder of CD Baby which he sold for $22 million last year but he’s also been a professional musician and at one point a circus clown.
He is very much a Scanner who has found a way to manage his addiction to learning, creativity and variety to launch [...]

Our greatest fear in creativity is not that we are crap but that we are mediocre - of moderate to low abilities. Crap is easier; you know you missed and should look elsewhere. Mediocre is far more challenging.
Yet mediocrity is something you need to come to terms with because much of your work will fall [...]

“What’s your favourite animal?” people would ask me when I was a child. It’s one of those questions you get asked a lot as a child (and never again as an adult). I would say “Penguin”.
Not dog, cat, lion, tiger, horse. I picked the animal that seemed furthest from my suburban home in the Midlands. My [...]

Back when I did standup, people would often ask “How do you come up with your material?”
My answer it that it’s not as difficult as you might imagine, it’s all in the editing. Here are the steps:

Start a new Word document called “Comedy material”
Write down everything you can remember that you think is funny, including [...]

If you’re putting a lot of effort into your work for what you get back, chances are you’re “out of flow”.
Being “in flow” is about bullding your working life around the things that suit your personality naturally. The result is you end up enjoying your work you so much you actually feel guilty getting paid [...]

My aim is to play all day and get paid. That means to do whatever creative, fun stuff I love doing, to have oodles of variety and freedom, and to make good money doing it.
I’ve found that the more I play (the more I focus on what I love and dare to experiment and explore) the more [...]

I’m feeling jealous. There’s something about a recent client’s career that I want for myself.
This happens from time to time as a careers coach. The two times that stand out for me, it was with people considering working for large cutting edge creative agencies.
These are high profile organisations that are tough to get into. One client [...]

I meet people at careers workshops who want to do something creative like writing but they’re not doing it. It’s like they’re waiting for some kind of permission to start.
They say “I don’t know if I’m good enough” like there’s an Independent Talent Auditing Board who issues licenses. Guess what, no one can stop you! [...]