Elizabeth Gilbert: Success, failure and the drive to keep creating

Elizabeth Gilbert returns to the TED stage. Once she was an "unpublished diner waitress," devastated by rejection letters, and yet, in the wake of the success of 'Eat, Pray, Love,' she found herself identifying strongly with her former self. With beautiful insight, Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple — though hard — way to carry on, regardless of outcomes. 

Frank Chimero: No New Tools

Another great essay by Frank Chimero: 

So, now I come to the part where I make my plea: no new tools, please. If you are interested in improving how people work, you should devise methods for work, manners of behavior, and methods of decision making. Document your ideology and apply it with existing tools, so nearly anyone can follow along. Why don’t you use our best tool? Language. Increasingly, I feel documentation beats an app if you’re trying to shepherd an idea along. This approach seems to have worked pretty well for David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Josh Clark’s Couch to 5K. Of course there are innumerable apps supporting each method, but the ideas are bigger than an app, so you don’t need to download anything. Buy a notebook or put on your running shoes. Commit to the plan.

Really enjoyed reading this essay. It is not about to-do lists, or project management methodologies. Being productive is about cultivating the right habits, the right reflexes to circumstances as they occur. 

Joi Ito & Tim Brown on The Future of Making

The idea of making isn't just reserved for handmade bikes, artisan pickles, and Arduino helicopters. The future of making is a product of our human needs and the possibilities we create through technology. This is about a larger shift towards making and the unexpected movements that might occur. It's about how everyone from you to your grandma might design, make and consume products or experiences in the next 10 to 15 years. In this SxSW Interactive session Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, and Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, will host a conversation that considers how we might fashion new tools for the future and then how those tools might influence our lives.

Larry Smith: Why you will fail to have a great career

 In this funny and blunt talk, Larry Smith, A professor of economics at the University of Waterloo in Canada, pulls no punches when he calls out the absurd excuses people invent when they fail to pursue their passions. (Filmed at TEDxUW.)  

We all have the same 24 hours, this is how really creative people use theirs

A great infographic from Info We Trust:

How do creatives – composers, painters, writers, scientists, philosophers – find the time to produce their opus? Mason Currey investigated the rigid Daily Rituals that hundreds of creatives practiced in order to carve out time, every day, to work their craft. Some kept to the same disciplined regimen for decades while others locked in patterns only while working on specific works.

There are enough data to visualize a portion of the hundreds of creative lifestyles.