Each Friday, I send advice, ideas, stories and tips to 25K creative people like you. Author of 13 best-selling books on creativity. Founder of Sketchbook Skool w 50k+ students
🥰 Kinda like being in love
|
When people undergo what, for lack of a less awkward term, I’ll call a “creative reawakening,” they often experience a surge of synchronicity. Serendipity abounds. Opportunities bounce into their laps. Like-minded people just show up. Connections are forged, sparks fly, light blink on. Life gets spicy. Some attribute this to a greater power: “God loves those who create.” Maybe so. I have a more down-to-earth hypothesis. When you allow yourself to be creative, to make things, to smell roses, see colors, hear symphonies, dance fandangos — your antennas rise. You start to scan through new stations, to retune. Instead of trudging in your rut, you look up and see stars and bluebirds. It’s kinda like being in love. In love with life. With the world. With yourself. The world is always full of opportunity, of beauty, of possibilities, of stimulus, and pots of gold. When you finally start to look around, to see clearly, to live in the Now and dump your baggage, you can’t help but notice. When you notice the world, you notice it notices you. You open up to people who you would normally ignore, and they open up to you, revealing how much they are like you and how much they like you too. You discover new pages of the menu. You hear lyrics to songs you used to fast forward. You read poems carved in monuments. You open your fortune cookies. Small wonder the world suddenly seems to be flowing your way. It always did — but perhaps you were too busy, head down, paddling upstream to notice. Your pal, Danny |
Danny Gregory: I help you make art again
Each Friday, I send advice, ideas, stories and tips to 25K creative people like you. Author of 13 best-selling books on creativity. Founder of Sketchbook Skool w 50k+ students
Last week, Jenny and I went to a new restaurant. We sat at the bar, hit it off with the bartender, and everything was perfect—until I spotted a typo on the cocktail list. “Pomagranite.” A tiny flaw in a flawless evening. Should I mention it? Would it feel like nitpicking? I thought about how I feel when someone writes me about a typo in one of my essays. I don’t mind—I’m grateful. It means they’re paying attention, that they trust me enough to point it out. It feels like collaboration, not...
I’ve noticed that my hair has become more and more white. Perhaps you've noticed it, too. It could be the stress of the last few years. Or maybe I’ve just become saltier. Less peppery. It's probably just genes. For as long as I knew him, my grandfather had white hair, too. He rocked it well. I kinda like the fact that I'm not in-between any longer. I'm not grey. I’m not middle-aged. I'm an old guy now. I have wrinkles on my face, a Medicare card, and a couple of brown spots. And this white...
Last week, I sent you an essay on how I respond, as a creative person, to Artificial Intelligence. It’s so exciting to be in attendance at the birth of a technology with such potential to make our lives better and easier. But it’s also problematic, and I think about that a lot, too. It was an essay I first drafted more than six months ago, but to be honest, I sat on it for so long because I was nervous about sending it to you. I’ve seen such an unpleasant response in the art community to the...