🌊 Creativity Tap
Summary
🚰 Creativity Tap: quick tips on how to get creative.
🎯 Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs): Something to keep on your radar.
💵 Recent Deals in Spain: Copado, YBVR and Inbentus.
💭 Thinking or Reading: Mars is wild
🚰 Creativity Tap
This piece is written by Sunny Huang, a dear friend whom I met in Silicon Valley. He is an early employee at Gong.io, a polymath, an insane photographer and one of the most interesting people I know.
He breaks down how to get creative, especially when it seems like you can’t. Enjoy!
In this era of ever-present distractions, it feels nearly impossible to sit down and do deep, creative work. The brain is very good at finding excuses to stop and do something else when inspiration doesn't strike immediately.
Why is it so difficult, when the desire to create is so strong? The key to fixing this, is to recontextualize bad ideas as a necessary part of the creativity process.
This is neatly summarised in what Julian Shapiro refers to as "The Creativity Faucet":
"The brain has a linear pipeline for creativity, and the pipe needs clearing. Visualize your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile of piping is packed with wastewater. This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives."
The same notion and approach is echoed by several other prolific writers and entrepreneurs, and it can be applied to everything.
Seth Godin: "The problem is that you can't have good ideas unless you're willing to generate a lot of bad ones."
Take a look at Neil Gaiman's rules of writing in the middle of the chart:
"Sit here and write or sit here & do nothing, but you can't do anything else."
Writing can be laborious, so Neil built in rules that force him to sit through the period of discomfort, and sift through the wastewater until he reaches inspiration. For many of us, the problem is not so much the "doing," but more so the "starting."
Knowing how painful it is to grind through uninspired work, whatever it may be, prevents us from even beginning. Momentum and flow is fun, overcoming inertia takes discipline.
When procrastination strikes, follow Kevin Systrom's, co-founder of Instagram, favorite life-hack - the 5 Minute Rule:
“If you don’t want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it. After five minutes, you’ll end up doing the whole thing".
🎨 Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and Digital Art
If you haven’t heard of NFTs and the recent surge in digital art linked to this fascinating technology, please read this.
Tl;dr: NFTs are useful for proving the scarcity and provenance of rare assets, both digital and real-world - enabling the safe commercialisation of digital art.
Token (noun): Digital representation of an asset recorded on the blockchain.
Non Fungible (adjective): Indivisible and unique.
Why should you care? 👇
Example: Today you cannot buy ANY of the Cryptopunk's for less than $25k, some have already sold for over $750k.
If you are lazy and prefer a podcast, listen to this one with Katie Haun from a16z.
💵 Recent Deals in Spain
You love startups and want to enjoy a Spanish lifestyle? Come join the Spanish startup ecosystem. Here’s a list of recently funded startups:
💭 Thinking or Reading
🔴 Mars is wild
NASA’s website has upped their game, and the Perseverance shares its first color image of the red planet.
👩🎨 Hiring great candidates
“It seems like with all the really good people I want to hire … it’s always been like that. It takes me a year to pry them out of HP or wherever,” he said. “And they’re all worth it.”
✍️ Quote I’m Pondering
"Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life."
— Sam Altman
If you find this interesting, please consider sharing with your friends. I’d also love to get your thoughts and feedback on Twitter. Until the next one! 😃