By all measures, you would consider me to be someone involved in the creative pursuits. I am also a writer and commentator on many things, both on this blog and off. So I do not broach the subject of originality lightly. The long surviving myth of originality and the stupidity of most criticism as petty [...]

Compassion is a deep awareness of, and a sympathy with, someone else’s suffering. That is the traditional definition, but really compassion is much broader than that. Compassion is an innate sense of empathy with things and people outside of ourselves — not just their suffering but their feelings, their thinking, and their situation. To be [...]

Just a few days ago I was telling you how procrastination is your greatest enemy, and now I have decided to reveal to you how procrastinating can sometimes be a good thing. Before you card-carrying members of the angry mob attack with pitchforks and torches, let me explain. It’s not that I am a fence-sitter [...]

Luciano Passuello over at Litemind recently put up the final list of entries in his Lists Group Writing Project. I had thrown in my hat into the ring with my entry about procrastination. Now it’s voting time, and as I have done before on similar projects, I decided to look though all 66 entries and [...]

All the ideas and brainstorming in the world can’t help you if you don’t take action and do something about them. In any process of creation your greatest enemy is always procrastination. If you ever wish to be someone who actually achieves something, rather than one of the many who had all the best ideas, [...]

If your first reaction to reading the title of this piece was, “Since when are dictionaries brainstorming tools?!”, you obviously haven’t heard the news. Dictionaries are in fact excellent brainstorming tools, and I’ve been using them in that capacity for years; They are an essential part of my creative ideas arsenal. To find out more [...]

brainstorming n. intensive discussion to solve problems or generate ideas That’s what my dictionary says, and it is absolutely right. Brainstorming is always a discussion, but what gets most people confused is that they often need to generate ideas on their own, without the benefit of discussion with another human being. Creative pursuits can be [...]