Creatives Everywhere

The most creative people I know are very empathic. In fact, I don’t think I know any creative person who isn’t an empath. And now that I think about it, I don’t think I know any empath who isn’t extremely creative.

Creativity isn’t confined to writers, painters, musicians and whatever else that comes to mind first when we think of the word. Now more than ever, creatives take more forms than we can even imagine, and creativity is part and parcel of more and more new jobs.

The Importance Of Characters

If we look at the core of creativity, we will be looking at…

Everyone Is Paranoid

Too often it is too tempting to think somebody is out to get us. Playing the victim can be rewarding, particularly when we aren’t really anybody’s victims.

Contrary to what one would think, this affliction is also common among those who claim to have an analytical mind, a logical brain that makes decisions based on data and not on belief. When something unexpected and harmful happens to us, we might not claim that someone is out to get us straightaway, but we will look for facts that may corroborate the story. …

The form is important but it can never replace the content. Many learn this the hard way, but they are still better off than those who don’t learn it at all.

Bad Thinking

I remember correcting a particularly poor essay when I was a teacher for an English as a second language course. My first reaction was that the student was at a level that was too high for them, that their foundation wasn’t solid enough; in short, they didn’t know enough English to be writing the type of essay that was expected.

However, something was off. Usually, when you read someone’s…

Infinite Games

I grew up when video games ran in cartridges and I was lucky to be part of a family where getting one was a birthday or Christmas affair. I used to imagine myself in a room filled with those old-school cartridges (a ball pit of sorts) where I’d have to swim to reach a little submerged sub-room where the games could be played.

Video games were rather limited back then — if miles ahead of those the older guys would show us, the ones they had played a decade before, and still a universe away from what was to come…

The Universe Got Impatient

Sometimes reality aligns certain facts in a way that one cannot escape finding meaning. It is almost as though the universe got impatient at our lack of acuteness and handed us an answer to a question we hadn’t even begun to ask.

These are the facts I got this week:

1) where I live there are more jobs than applicants after the pandemic,

2) I was asked to sign a petition for the UK government not to scrap the £20 uplift added to its universal credit programme due to the current the crisis,

3) one of the podcasts I listen…

Sobering Image

Imagine we kept track of all the decisions we ever made. Now imagine we also kept track of all the decisions we never made.

It is a daunting prospect. It is overwhelming. It is sobering.

The Opportunity

It would also be a unique opportunity to make better decisions going forward, however painful our first visits to this hypothetical decision archive would be.

I am not making the cheap argument of looking back at past decisions before making new decisions. Past decisions can inform future decisions to a certain degree, but they aren’t valid substitutes. We cannot simply look at what we did…

Languages

I’ve always believed that speaking more than one language gives the speaker an advantage. In fact, I think this is an understatement. The advantages are many. When one speaks more than two or three languages, the benefits grow exponentially.

This isn’t an article about languages, though, but about taxonomy, or the science of classification, and how it can be used to change our lives.

Of Ravens And Crows

In English, there is a distinction between ravens and crows. There are many discussions, articles and videos on spotting the differences between the two. If you spoke a Latin language, however, these discussions, articles and videos…

Any creative mind comes up with more stories than any human hand can write. In a sort of parallel reality live the many discarded, orphaned and abandoned stories that we never wrote. And yet the best ones are indeed out there to be read.

When I say stories I mean books and albums and exhibitions and manifestos and any form of creative output you can think of. Implemented ideas that we put out there.

As a kid, I always had a very active mind, with many characters living inside of me and going on the most magnificent adventures while I…