There is a time and place for the purposeful noisiness of busy. The work surrounding a group of people building an impressive thing contains essential and unavoidable busy and you will be rewarded for consistently performing this work well. This positive feedback can feed the erroneous assumption, “Well, the more busy I am, the more rewards forthcoming.” This is compounded by the insidious fact that part of being busy is you aren’t actually aware that you’re busy because you’re too busy being busy. You have no internal measurement of the amount of time you’ve actually spent being busy.

In my precious hour, I am aware that it is quiet. During this silence, maybe nothing at all is built other than the room I’ve given myself to think. I break the flow of enticing small things to do, I separate myself from the bright people on similarly impressive busy quests, and I listen to what I’m thinking.

Every day, for an hour, no matter what.

The initial idea is just a starting point-- not a blueprint, but a question. It might help if they were expressed that way. Instead of saying that your idea is to make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet, say: could one make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet? A few grammatical tweaks, and a woefully incomplete idea becomes a promising question to explore.

COLOURlovers is a creative community where people from around the world create and share colors, palettes and patterns, discuss the latest trends and explore colourful articles... All in the spirit of love.

The film legend discusses books that have resonated with him, from JD Salinger to Elia Kazan and beyond.

And that’s the greatest lie of the Noise. The idea that listening and reacting to the Noise is significant progress. Yes, these small bits of work we do all day are essential to getting things done, but go back to your last big vacation. After the first three days of decompression, when you were sitting in that hammock with a glass of red wine, under that oak tree that is older than anyone you know… tell me what you were thinking about. Was it the 27 bugs you left in an unverified state, or was it the epiphany that in the first three decades of your life you haven’t come close to building something as impressive as this damned oak tree?

In the face of such odds, merely writing a novel must seem perverse. Self-indulgent, at the very least, if not financial suicide. The question is less whether the novel as a form is dying, or if the internet can offer a lifeline to certain writers. What cries out for explanation is the strange, persistent fact that millions of us spend years attempting something for which we are certain to see little, if any, reward. 

Don’t depend on Delicious; host your own, pay for it elsewhere, or hope for the best. Use real-time feeds to stitch the bookmarking diaspora back together into topical aggregate indexes.

In one of his recent presentations, Frans Johansson explained why groundbreaking innovators generate and execute far more ideas than their counterparts. After watching his presentation The Secret Truth About Executing Great Ideas, my thoughts began to surface about how meaningful the presentation was regardless of a persons industry, culture, field or discipline. Anyone can come up with an amazing idea but how you execute the idea will determine your success.

Maybe you don’t know anything about this man, Montaigne; perhaps you know him as the bane of your high school existence for inventing the word “essay.” What I’d like to do in this piece is tell you a bit more about him and hopefully remove him from the realm of people-from-history-you-don’t-care-about and place him in his proper context: as our greatest philosopher of life. And Montaigne was a philosopher in the truest sense; he studied life and how we can wring all that we can from the short bit of time each of us is given. Philosophy can seem boring—truthfully, most of it is—but Montaigne is not only incredibly accessible; just a brush with his brand of thinking can change our lives.

My buds over at LIFE.com asked me to come up with a list of common mistakes folks make when starting out with a camera in their hands. Okay. No shortage of material here, right? And they came to the right source, ’cause I’ve made every mistake, basic and advanced, that one could possibly think of. Hell, I’ve even invented some mistakes. But they did a nice job, matching historical photos from the voluminous LIFE library with my ramblings. They also edited, well, some of my more irreverent language, which, this being my blog, I include below:-)

Hailed as the “godfather of Brooklyn pizza,” for forty five years Domenico DeMarco, Italian émigré and father of seven, has been slinging pizzas in his legendary corner shop, Di Fara. Employing five of his children, Dom works tirelessly from morning until night hand crafting each and every pizza himself while his kids take orders and manage the mob of devoted pizza aficionados. The Best This I Ever Done is a portrait of DeMarco and his beloved pizzeria, an exploration of his rise to fame and an ode to pizzaioli who take their time to 'make it right.'

I don’t want to appear to be giving advice on something I don’t know much about, but here goes: from someone who has gained what I’d call a respectable audience and the awareness and respect of some people he admires, to people who wish for but don’t feel they have those things: all it takes is some patience (and of course effort to be great). That’s it.

So, first, care. Then, as you’ll happily and unavoidably discover, all that “focus” business has a peculiar way of taking care of itself.

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Anonymous asked: What advice would you give to a graphic design student?

Ryan's 35 lessons in 35 years is required reading if you are a man. And probably if you are a woman: http://j.mp/bzpCCY

Bernadette Mayer's List of Journal Ideas:

Everyone wants to be like Steve Jobs and his powerhouse company. It's not as easy as it looks.

RT @GrantaMag: Writers' daily routines! Can't wait for the book http://bit.ly/bn05hY

Nice interview by @3rdmartini with the superb @lonelysandwich on creative failure: http://bit.ly/a6gXLM

Comedian Harry Hill discusses his unusual paintings: "Being an artist is a higher calling than a comedian, because the comedian has to respond to his or her audience. In comedy I've had many jokes which I thought were really funny, but if the audience doesn't laugh, you end up having to drop them. An artist can do what he or she likes. You may not sell many paintings, but you're still an artist."

"Robin ruminates on applying the economic concepts of stock and flow to the media we produce. In short, flow is the low-impact fluff that reminds people you exist. Stock is the valuable, durable content you produce that conceivably has a long shelf-life."

"If I’m not laughing at your joke, complimenting your insight, or leading the Standing O for something you spent 10 seconds pecking up on your phone, it may not be because I don’t get it; it may be because I think we’re both capable of better and just need to find the courage to say so. In as many characters as it takes."

Graphic designer Glaser shares 10 nuggets of wisdom from his long and successful career.

I've only recently heard of Frank Chimero and started reading him, but I'm delighted I have. Here he rails against our how-to culture (something I'm getting increasingly tired of) and gives us the one true piece of advice we all need: do what you're best at, and keep doing it. There are no recipes.

"A realization has been dawning on me as of late, one that I’ve always known, but that is easy to forget, easy to misplace, easy to neglect. The best way to learn anything is to do it, to struggle through, to forge on, to fight and gnash teeth and curse at. There is no knowledge as highly regarded as that which you have to work for."

"His syllabus was wonderful -- and yes, it had footnotes. He seemed to be chewing tobacco and spitting it into a mug as he talked about why this was going to be a class where we as writers improve our ability to engage a reader who has zero interest in our opinions or emotions. He wore big black shoes, the laces seemed undone, and had a bandanna on his head."

"I’m an avid reader, a bookworm, a bibliomane, call it what you will. I’m seldom caught without a book in my bag. I’ve just finished several non-fiction which have been gathering dust on my shelves and before I launch into a few reviews I thought I’d share my top 7 tips for reading, in particular non-fiction (with a major hat-tip to Ben for writing about this very topic back in March 2007 and also to Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader which in itself is fiction but expresses the joy and wonder that comes from reading in a way I can never hope to capture here)."

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."

"Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google."

"And in a corner of the white board at the end of his long conference room, Mr. Collins keeps a short list. That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do."

"I decided to explore the idea of freelancing when several people from the office complimented my writing one after the other. My problem was that I had no idea what I wanted to do exactly. Yes, it was going to involve writing of some sorts. I discovered I had a knack for words (my boss even trusted me to write a press release about a new product we were launching — not bad for someone 6 months out of university!) but I had never been specifically hired and paid by others just to 'write stuff.'"

"The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from."

"A wandering mind can do important work, scientists are learning - and may even be essential."

"Jason Rohrer's solitary and stubborn quest for a future in which pixels and code and computers will make you cry and feel and love."

"Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder."

"If I’m not laughing at your joke, complimenting your insight, or leading the Standing O for something you spent 10 seconds pecking up on your phone, it may not be because I don’t get it; it may be because I think we’re both capable of better and just need to find the courage to say so. In as many characters as it takes."

A neat venn diagram on why we should combine what we do well, what we want to do, and what we can be paid to do - aka the 'Hooray!' zone.