My last day as VP, Product Design at Hulu was Monday, February 8th. I worked at that remarkable company for five years and one month. It’s a strange, exciting and liberating feeling to move on to new things. It’s scary and filled with unseen potential.
Read MoreOn November 20th, I participated in the inaugural Rotman Business Design Initiative event by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. The theme was Decoding Design for Innovation. The session I was involved in was moderated by Clay Chandler, (Executive Editor, Asia Fortune Magazine), and the legendary designer Bruce Mau and the wonderful Angele Beausoleil (Profesor of Business Design and Innovation at the Rotman School of Management).
Read MoreConstructive risk is expansive, has energy, and allows you to consider, What can go right? The opposite of this, is the constrictive, risk-averse, survival-focused mantra of What can go wrong? Risk assessment balances the two but I would propose that most of us tend to focus on what can go wrong over what could go right.
Read MoreSo how do I make a personal creative practice while balancing the demands of reality? The answer is pretty simple. I make “sacred time and space” for my personal endeavors. You can choose any hour you like at any time of day (4 am, 3 pm, midnight, whatever floats your boat) but the rules are that you simply do that one thing that is only for you, whether it’s yoga, meditation, writing, playing guitar, making art or chopping wood. You can only do that one thing and nothing else. If you are composing music on a piano, you either play or you sit and do nothing. No social media, no TV. No nothing but simply the task at hand.
Read MoreIt’s been a week since a helicopter went down in Calabasas, taking the lives of 9 passengers, along with Kobe Bryant and his daughter, Gianna. The world felt this one, as Kobe was one of those mythical figures, like Prince or John Lennon, whose contributions and excellence in their respective fields meant so much to so many. And when shooting stars die young, we feel the additional loss of their unfulfilled and unexpressed potential; there was so much they were going to do to make this world a more beautiful and wondrous place.
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When I lived in San Francisco, a couple decades ago, I would draw every Sunday morning at a studio a few blocks away from my home in Noe Valley. I would carry my box of charcoal, pencils, erasers and drawing board down to a studio that focused on life studies. Sunday morning was an open, non-instructional, time and I paid for the opportunity to draw from a live model.
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When I walk into a bookstore or library, I’m often overwhelmed by the sheer number of books that are available. Thousands upon thousands. And these are only the books that actually made it through the process of publishing, marketing and press and actually got placed into a bookstore or online distribution. For every book published, there are thousands more, half-written, languishing in laptops or in dusty desk drawers.
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I was interviewed over the weekend by Dov Baron for his video-podcast called Curiosity Bites (my episode comes out in a couple of months -- stay tuned). Dov is a charismatic man whose resume runs from being a leadership coach to author to speaker to podcaster just to name a few arenas. Our discussion was very far-reaching and varied to say the least, running the gamut from design to art to business to languages and culture to being a parent. Underlying the whole discussion was the theme of creativity.
At one point I blurted out that, to me, creativity equates to freedom.
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Recently, I decided to do a thought experiment. I made an attempt to go through each day without complaining and also not allowing myself to either become angry or react to another person’s anger.
This is much tougher than it seems. The usual internal default mode for most humans is to find something annoying and then complain about it, ostensibly to relieve one’s internal stress about the issue and to spur on some kind of action. What I’ve found is that on a very basic level, complaining is simply a way for one to defer responsibility to another person or situation and essentially cry out for someone else to do something about said issue. The term “complaint” is nuanced and I’m not referring to important complaints about larger social issues (#metoo movement, climate change, et al) but rather the smaller complaints we launch out into the world from a position of feeling imposed on. I find that once complaints are vocalized some stress is released but in reality, at least for me, the concerning issue bounces around in my head and often gains steam. The negativity then becomes a flywheel that fans the embers of discontent and then anger arises.
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At the end of every year, my wife and I open a leather-bound book of our annual goals. First, we review what we wrote at the beginning of that year. It’s always disconcerting and inspiring to realize that we average around 75 to 80% success on what we envisioned for that year. Things that we were pretty sure would be beyond the pale of what we could accomplish. It also sets the bar for what we think we should accomplish in the new year.
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