creative maverick

I’ve been quiet here on Creative Maverick as I’ve been very busy elsewhere with a new blog on a similar topic.
My book Screw Work Let’s Play: How to do what you love and get paid for it is published by Prentice Hall in 9 weeks’ time. And in preparation I am blogging every day on how [...]

For a lot of us, particularly creative people, conventional goal setting and planning techniques just don’t work.
So how do we engineer a great year for ourselves without all that SMART goal crap? One doing the whole variety of stuff we enjoy while making a good living at the same time?
I gave a talk at January Scanners Night on [...]

I started this blog exactly one year ago and billed it as a one year experiment in creative living - an experiment to do what I love doing most, worry a little less about where it might lead, and see if I can end up getting “paid to play”.
Did it work?
Well in April of this [...]

It’s funny that my first reaction this morning after last night’s talk by San Sharma at Scanners Night on Social Media is to quit 2 social networking sites.
What I’ve realised is that if I want to play all day and get paid, it’s essential I surround myself with people of similar values - people who [...]

Since taking the Lightning Process training, I reckon I’ve got the answer to that old secret-of-happiness question. Want to know it?
How to be happy
Think happy thoughts, recall happy memories, create happy visions of the future.
Er that’s it.
Michael Neill makes a great case in his book Feel Happy Now! that happiness is not dependent on external [...]

A Block Busting day is something I created to solve two of the biggest problems of working on your own - having no boss to hold you accountable and feeling isolated (particularly if you work at home).
The result of these two issues is that some big ugly tasks stay on your To Do list forever. [...]

“Know thine enemy as completely as you know yourself and you will always be victorious.” Sun Tzu
The number one enemy of your creativity and happiness is your Top Dog. Every creativity exercise ever invented was designed to get past it.
Life Coach Pete Cohen says:
“The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your [...]

I want to work a maximum of 4 hours per day (see this earlier post) and I’m guessing this might appeal to a lot of other people too. Given that the average office worker only does 90 minutes of genuinely useful work per day, I reckon I should do just fine on 4 hours of [...]

I want to work a 4 hour day as I wrote in the previous post. There’s a snag here. I am currently doing even more than a standard 8 hour working day - sometimes only switching off my computer late at night.
If I want a different result, I will need to change what I’m doing. [...]

Tim Ferriss wrote the wonderful book The 4-Hour Work Week about how to automate your work so you can go live anywhere in the world and do whatever you want to do.
The snag for me right off the bat is that I’m not sure I want a 4 hour work week. I reckon the ideal [...]