I want to look a category of weird mental tricks that we sometimes play on ourselves—you may be familiar with them individually, but when considered together they reveal a pattern that I think deserves more discussion. Continue reading
I made a short video course where I explain my entire process for making paintings. Because painting isn’t my most comfortable medium, I try my best to make it an easy, quick, successful project. I work in a sequence of steps that reliably move the project forward and minimize the risk of big mistakes. This is the first time I’ve made something like this, so I’m giving it away for free. Continue reading
I made a painting of one of my favorite scenes from the TV show Mad Men. Continue reading
I made a fun digital rendition of a frame from the TV show Mad Men. My original idea was to make a painting of it, but while I was thinking through how to edit my reference images in Photoshop/Blender, I got some ideas that I wanted to experiment with in depth. Continue reading
This post is about a certain kind of procrastination; I call it “over-managing.” It’s when you know what you should be working on at a given time, but instead of doing the work, you continue to deliberate over big-picture / planning decisions. As productive individuals, we have to be good Managers, but we also need to be able to call the plan “good enough” and be the Employee. Continue reading
Hue Paint is a digital tool I made to force a given hue (color) onto an image, but only where it looks right. So, if you pick out a specific “red,” you can make all the reds in the image match it, and leave the other colors unchanged. This is a subtle way to make any photo match a given color palette. Continue reading
What color is Monday? What color is three? It turns out, we do associate random things with certain colors, and in many cases we tend to report the same associations. There IS a color of Monday. Continue reading
I put this together to talk about meta-skills: the broad skills that help all generalists manage and balance their particular skills and interests. In my own life, the reason I got interested in productivity and time management and the like was because I was a generalist, and I needed to get good at juggling everything. So this page covers what I’ve learned so far, and I’m sure I’ll add to it in the future. Continue reading
I wrote this short series to talk about a weird thing in the modern world: there are a few areas where pretty much everybody needs to be knowledgeable. Each individual now bears some responsibilities, fully, which in past generations were shared or outsourced. Since we each need to have these few areas covered, on top of whatever else we’re doing in our lives, we’re all necessary generalists. Continue reading
This is a crosspost from True Generalist. This post goes deeper into why I made that site, what being a generalist means to me, and why the present time and place is an ideal environment for generalists. Continue reading
I’m very excited to announce a brand-new project that I’ve been working on for the better part of last year. It’s a website called True Generalist (truegeneralist.com), and it’s all about giving generalists the resources they need to excel at everything they do. Continue reading
At this time of year, everyone either writes a “How to set and keep your New Year’s resolution” article, or a “Why you shouldn’t set a New Year’s resolution” article. This is the latter. Continue reading
I’ve been noticing that a recurring theme in my writing here is balance between opposites. I’ve written about balancing consumption vs. production in your life, and recently about balancing systems vs. goals for achieving what you desire. And I can think of a few more that I haven’t written about yet, that I’d like to touch on. It could become a pain to try to keep so many balances in mind, but I thought if I could arrange most of it hierarchically, that would be much cleaner. Continue reading
Last year I wrote about setting personal goals. One bit of feedback I got went something like, “Goal setting is a bad mindset, you should use systems instead.” I’ve heard that idea before, with a few different justifications. I do have some thoughts, and experience, on using systems to build skills or manage productivity, and I realized I should write on that too in order to make the goal-setting content more complete. Continue reading
This one came from another dream I had. Nothing really happened in the dream that I can remember, but the physical space was pretty striking. There’s lots of meanings we could ascribe to this. I have an interpretation, but I’d rather leave it up to you. Continue reading
