We all get stuck.

It’s best to keep turning up in those habits we’ve made work.

Don’t force it.  Trust.

It’s not easy, though.

We can worry nothing’s going to happen today: no ideas, no possibilities.

…

…

…

Then something from McNair Wilson caught my eye today:*

‘Inside Pixar they refer to their story
board sketches as “postcards from the future.”‘

Boom: a trail begins.

I love the future and I love the idea of postcards from the future.

Postcards are very analogue for me.

I’ve mentioned how these blogs begin with a journal and a fountain pen – someone once described this as the ideal writing instrument for the flow of ideas from the brain to the hand (I wish I could remember who so I could tell you).  We need to make things visible to the eye

Postcards and analogue remind me of something Austin Kleon encourages.  He has two desks: one for digital and one for analogue: we can’t do everything creative on a computer, yet thinking about things is a digital activity too, so we need to speak it out loud, or write or draw it, or sculpt something:

‘It wasn’t until I started bringing analogue
tools back into my process that making
things became fun again and my work
started to improve.’**

Go with the flow.

So, this thought from Burt Rutan followed:

“Revolutionary ideas come from nonsense.  
If an idea is truly a breakthrough, then the
day before it was discovered, it must have
been considered crazy or nonsense or both
– otherwise it wouldn’t be a breakthrough.”^

Before I put the book Rutin is quoted in back onto the bookshelf, I allow the page to turn and these words from Arianna Huffington (founder of the Huffington Post) catch my eye:^^

“Bottom line, taking risks is an indispensable
part of an creative act.”

Why?

Because we cannot always make the breakthrough we need to linearly.  (As I mentioned at the beginning, don’t force it.)

Then I read these words from Stephen Johnson:

“The strange and beautiful truth about the
adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow
as you explore them.  Each new combination
opens up the possibility of new combinations.”*^

The adjacent possible is the long list of possibilities which open up when a new discovery is made.

I like to use the term for a person’s life once they discover some new possibility for their lives they’d never seen before but has always been there.

Before you know it, there’s this long list of ideas or possibilities, and it’s time to do something with them.

Sometimes, though, we’re stuck simply stuck because we messed up somewhere and we simply can’t focus.  Good news: forgiveness is available – apply liberally and get going again.

(*My day begins with scanning many sources for ideas and possibilities to explore and maybe develop.)
(**From Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist.)
(^Quote in Peter Diamandis’s Abundance.)
(^^I love my Kindle for many things, but this wouldn’t have happened with a Kindle – analogue over digital.)
(*^Also from Abundance.  I love the upbeat-ness of Diamandis.)