Everyone wishes for more time. More time to create, more time to sleep, more time with loved ones. We constantly search for more time and fail. What if, instead of adding more time, you could multiply the time you already have?
For seven years, I worked for a nonprofit, managing teams in various departments and communicating with team members and colleagues. Inevitably, this meant a lot of communication with a lot of different people every day, which felt like I was being productive, but in fact was the opposite.
There is a fine line between shipping and sucking.
Here’s what I mean by that:
If you subscribe to any number of blogs on writing, productivity, or business, you’ve probably heard the term “shipping” used in reference to creative work.
But there is a shadow side to shipping.
Productivity is a lost art. Day after day, it’s a conversation with yourself that begins with, “I should get started on X, but…”
It’s too easy to get sucked into a world of distractions. Why be productive and work when I could be doing something else entirely?
I was on vacation in California for a month and a half when something terrible happened: I stopped writing.
Distraction. It’s one of the fastest ways to lose our focus and start — uh, what was I saying? Sorry, I had to check my email real quick. Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah, distraction…
You and I are called to important work that not just anyone can do. And the biggest obstacle to accomplishing this is a million little distractions that we encounter every day.
Bestselling author and creativity expert Jeff Goins dismantles the myth that being creative is a hindrance to success by revealing how an artistic temperament is, in fact, a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
For centuries, the myth of the starving artist has dominated our culture, seeping into the minds of creative people and stifling their pursuits. But the truth is that the world’s most successful artists did not starve. In fact, they capitalized on the power of their creative strength. In Real Artists Don’t Starve, Jeff Goins debunks the myth of the starving artist by unveiling the ideas that created it and replacing them with fourteen rules for artists to thrive.
