November 3, 2024

Why You Need Flexible Routines

There’s nothing sexy about the word “routine.” Just thinking about it drains the air from my lungs. But without it, we get lost in the chaos of life, with nothing to hold onto or build from.

Routine isn’t the antithesis of a good, happy life; it’s its foundation.

As kids, routines create a sense of safety — a familiar framework that lets us explore, play, and learn without fear. As adults, routines give us purpose. Morning rituals, work schedules, and shutdown routines create a sense of control, order, and direction. These small, consistent actions are at the core of our personal, professional, and creative growth, helping us juggle our never-ending responsibilities as we tap into our deepest potential.

Routine is also the healthiest form of validation. Every time you show up for yourself — whether through exercise, writing, or a conscious breath — you remind yourself that you, as you are, already are who you want to be. Embracing routine means recognizing that greatness often lies on the path paved by our daily habits.

And if you’re a hardcore procrastinator like me, routine is the only over-the-counter medicine that works. When you define what needs to happen and when, you minimize the cracks through which distraction can slip. This approach helps you reduce your chances of getting pulled away from your ambitions, goals, and responsibilities.

But after more than a decade of trial and error — building and optimizing routines — I’ve discovered a key principle for designing effective and sustainable routines: flexibility.

Rigid structures break. Flexible structures adapt.

Rigid routines require way too much energy to maintain, eventually leading to burnout. Instead of helping you do more and better with less, by design, they leave you feeling like you’re not enough because they don’t bend, flow, and adapt to the pressures, changes, and opportunities of life.

If you want to build a routine that serves you until your bones turn to ash, focus on designing flexible routines.

I don’t know about you, but every time I travel, my habits go out the window because most of them are baked into my routines, and my routines, like most people’s, are anchored on specific places at specific times. Once you get me out of my space or mess with my bedtime, my routine crumbles. And when my routine crumbles, I crumble with it.

Why would anyone build such rigid, location-dependent routines?

Because that’s what the habit and productivity literature preaches: design your space, stack your habits, link them to cues.

If you’ve tried to build better routines and failed, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

This rigidity is a common approach to building habits — and a dangerous one. A habit should be able to function as an independent piece of your system rather than something your system depends on.

Otherwise, you fall into the routine trap — you become so dependent on your routine that you just can’t perform without it. One minute, you feel on top of the world. The next, you’re hitting a new bottom, dusting yourself off, and gearing up for the next climb.

Flexibility alone is not a great strategy, but every great strategy requires flexibility. Stay focused on the goal but flexible in the approach.

life creativity

October 29, 2024

The creative process of David Ogilvy

The father of modern advertising, David Ogilvy, sold BILLIONS of dollars for some of the biggest brands in the world with his pen.

He was a business mogul, a marketing genius, and a damn good writer.

On April 19, 1955, Ogilvy wrote a letter where he revealed the creative process that took him from dishwasher to legendary adman.

This is Ogilvy typing

Dear Mr. Calt:

On March 22nd you wrote to me asking for some notes on my work habits as a copywriter. They are appalling, as you are about to see:

1. I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.

2. I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years.

3. I am helpless without research material—and the more “motivational” the better.

4. I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.

5. Before actually writing the copy, I write down every conceivable fact and selling idea. Then I get them organized and relate them to research and the copy platform.

6. Then I write the headline. As a matter of fact I try to write 20 alternative headlines for every advertisement. And I never select the final headline without asking the opinion of other people in the agency. In some cases I seek the help of the research department and get them to do a split-run on a battery of headlines.

7. At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)

8. I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts.

9. If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.

10. The next morning I get up early and edit the gush.

11. Then I take the train to New York and my secretary types a draft. (I cannot type, which is very inconvenient.)

12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.

Altogether it is a slow and laborious business. I understand that some copywriters have much greater facility.

Yours sincerely,

D.O.

creativity business

October 22, 2024

How to get more (and better) eyes on your work

The only way to make this post more valuable is to print it on a hundred-dollar bill.

In case you haven’t noticed, over the last decade, the global economy has transitioned from an industrial economy to an attention economy — an era where attention is the most valuable scarce resource, and business giants are investing ridiculous amounts of money trying to maximize the time and attention consumers like you give to their products.

Attention is the new oil, and everybody’s after it.

So, if you’re running (or want to run) a creative business in the digital marketplace, it’s not enough for your writing to grab people’s attention, you must also nurture it. This means throwing away the clickbaity headlines, false promises, and shitty freebies; and instead, focusing on creating memorable experiences for your audience that leave a lasting impact and keep them in your information ecosystem.

Information overload and shortened attention spans make it difficult for great products, services, and ideas to stand out and stick around unless your work is rooted in empathy — unless you write like you care.

To be entrusted with the attention of the masses — the most valuable resource in today’s economy — stop recycling predatory headlines and the same stale content; instead, show how much you care and respect your audience by speaking directly and empathetically to their pain points and showing them you see them, understand them, and are dying to help.

If you want more and better eyes on your work, stop seeking attention and start being attentive.

creativity business

October 8, 2024

Kurt Vonnegut on living a creative life

You probably think I’m obsessed with Kurt Vonnegut.

You’re probably right.

But how could I not be?

How could you not?!

He was more than a brilliant writer. He was an angel on Earth.

In 2006, Ms. Lockwood, an English Teacher at Xavier High School in NYC, asked her freshman class to write a persuasive letter asking their favorite authors for a class visit.

Five students wrote to Kurt Vonnegut. He was the only writer who replied, and even though the author couldn’t pay them a visit, his response was brilliant. It changed my life. And who knows? Maybe it’ll change yours.

This is Vonnegut Typing

November 5, 2006

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana. 

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

In a world where most are trapped by the never-ending chase for clout and material wealth, creating to make your soul grow is an act of revolution.

Some people create for money and fame; others—to find what’s inside them. I don’t think one is better than the other, but I know where I stand.

Do you?

writing creativity

October 1, 2024

How to write with style

I just finished Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut — a gem of a novel by a master scribbler.

The book is so good it immediately snatched a spot in my top 10, and honestly, I can’t tell you which book it replaced. I don’t care.

But this isn’t a book review or a blowjob.

It’s an honest answer to a silly question that kept bugging me as I followed the protagonist, World War II veteran Billy Pilgrim, through one of the deadliest bombings in history — into a land where everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

How do I infuse my style and personality into everything I write — like Kurt?

I know, silly. Nobody can write like Kurt.

But it turns out Kurt himself answered that same question over 40 years ago — in a timeless ad campaign designed to make America literate again.

How to write with style

In the 1980s, International Paper ran a series of advertisements to help Americans read, write, and communicate better. One of the ads was an essay by Kurt Vonnegut titled, How to write with style.

Vonnegut writes, “Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them.”

Style is key to getting your message across.

Without style, your reader has no incentive to keep reading your dusty words—unless the reader is your mom.

Hi mom!

Style lets your reader know you have something interesting to say, and if they listen, you’ll make it worth their time.

I say listen because, contrary to popular belief, we don’t read with our eyes. We read with our ears. So, if you want your work to be seen, your words gotta sing.

Here is your first lesson in style: if it sounds like writing, rewrite it.

But mastery of the written word is only half of the battle. The other half requires you to have good ideas

This is how Kurt does it.

This is Kurt Vonnegut typing

1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

2. Do not ramble, though

I won’t ramble on about that.

3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. ‘To be or not to be?’ asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story ’Eveline’ is this one: ‘She was tired.’ At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

4. Have the guts to cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this. If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

5. Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the most remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

6. Say what you mean to say

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable - and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

7. Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, and art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school - twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknolwedge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify - whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.

8. For really detailed advice

For a disucssion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I commend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White (Macmillan, 1979). E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.

writing

September 25, 2024

How to unfuck your writing

You’re probably sick of the same stale writing advice.

If so, I’ve got good and bad news for ya.

The Bad News

Always start with the bad news.

The internet is infested with writing “gurus” who prey on new writers by selling the same recycled courses that promise a precise, creative, and profitable pen but leave you confused, overwhelmed, and broke.

The best courses might teach you how to write clickbaity headlines, build sketchy marketing funnels, and use ChatGPT to “10x your productivity,” but none of them will help you become a better writer

These courses aren’t writing courses. They are marketing courses for writers, which might help you get a little more attention but will not help you keep it.

The Good News

Despite most “writing” courses being a waste of money, there is a wealth of free writing advice that’s a lot better than 99% of the paid stuff out there. That’s because good writing advice doesn’t sell.

If you want to be a good writer, you have to write until your joints ache, your hair turns to ash, and your grandkids have grandkids.

That, my friend, is the best writing advice there is.

The second best is to learn from the greats whose wisdom lives in stories, letters, essays, journal entries, and notes they left behind.

So, if you want to craft better sentences, study the best writers. And every aspiring writer should study George Orwell, the mind behind 1984, Animal Farm, and the famous essay “Politics and the English Language.”

Politics and the English Language

In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell, with surgical precision, diagnoses the sickness plaguing modern prose.

Orwell writes, “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Lazy thinking breeds sloppy writing, and sloppy writing breeds lazy thinking . This is a vicious cycle that, if left unchecked, will continue until there’s nothing left to write  —  or think  —  about.

But Orwell also offers a way out.

“Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.”

This is how Orwell suggests you sharpen your pen.

Or, in more colloquial terms, this is how you unfuck your writing.

Be Clear

Vagueness weakens your writing. 

Confident prose is a byproduct of a precise pen and a clear mind.

“The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose.”

Good writing isn’t smart. It’s clear.

Be Creative

If your writing is creative but unclear, your writing is not creative.

“A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”

Flex your creative muscles.

“By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.”

But don’t get carried away. 

Clear first. Creative second.

Be Concise

Good writing is clear. Great writing is concise.

What’s wrong with the sentence below?

“The general consensus of opinion is that in the majority of instances, people tend to agree with the proposed idea.”

It’s fluff. It says a whole bunch of nothing.

Here’s a better version:

“Most people agree with the idea.”

In just six words, I said the same thing, and I kept your attention.

Don’t waste your reader’s time. As Orwell said, “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”

Kill your darlings. 

Remember the 3 Cs: Clear. Creative. Concise.

And if that isn’t enough to turn you into a decent scribbler, Orwell wraps up his lecture with a handy checklist.

4 Questions Great Writers Ask Themselves

Orwell writes, “A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions…”

1. What am I trying to say?

2. What words will express it?

3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?

4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Figure out what you want to say and say it.

If writing is thinking on paper and clear writing is hard, then clear thinking is hard.

So, to clear things up, Orwell encourages writers to ask two more questions: “Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”

In a world where content — and advice — is mass-produced, Orwell reminds us good sentences aren’t written; they’re crafted.

Use this advice to move your pen with purpose. It’ll clarify your thinking, sharpen your writing, and deepen your message.

writing