Cold drinks in the olden days

Remember when you were a kid how you had to struggle to pull up the lever on the aluminum ice cube tray until you heard a satisfying crack of the frozen water as the lever did its job? The top layer of your fingerprints would get stuck to the cold, cold metal as you inverted the silver, pink, or blue tray to get ice for a drink on a hot summer's day.

Creativity

Sometimes you've just got to have a spur to create. It's NOT, as contemporary culture would have you think, a luxury or an indulgence. Creativity is what makes us human. We create. We adapt. We evolve. We flourish.

Here are some ideas and links for getting your juices flowing:

NaNoWriMo.org -- National Novel Writing Month comes around each November. I'm in love with it. Take a 30-day deadline, write like mad each day for at least 1,667 words, and, voila, at the end of the day on November 30, you have a 50,000 word novel. I've done it four and a half times. I know it's possible. (Now, if I could only focus on the re-writes…)

Sabrinawardharrison.com -- Sabrina Ward Harrison is my new role model. Messy, creative, fearless AND fearful at the same time, she published her journals about creating and re-creating herself. She writes and creates beautiful and complex art.

Writersdigest.com -- Check out the writing prompts section. Create and post.

Theartistsway.com -- The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron is a classic. Do the book in order, pick and choose what you like, come back again and again. Yes, it's time consuming, but isn't it time you invested in yourself?

I'll add more links as I find them.

Happy creating!

Heat of the Moment

I'm not usually a big one on studies, but two came up recently that, when looked at together, explain a LOT of bad decisions.

The first was that productivity and critical thinking plummet when a negative or bullying person leads the process. Not only do people not want to work, but when they shut down their natural intellectual questions about the issue at hand, they move into "Group Think," in which they can justify any bad decision. One example is Nixon's White House staff planning a burglary to violate the privacy of Daniel Ellsberg. The "Final Solution" devised by the Nazis is another. Both situations had incredibly strong willed leaders and a breakdown in checks and balances of multiple points of view.

The second was in Harvard Business Review. Two researchers found that short-term negative emotions led to some irrational long-term decisions. Read more here.

Lesson: Don't make a long-term decision if you've been upset and keep your intellectual integrity by asking questions even in the face of a bully. It'll be better for the world in the long run.