Over notities

In de Correspondent las ik het interessante “Note to self: Hoe notities maken je leven verrijkt”.

Ik maak ook al jarenlang notities. In verschillende vormen.

Voor mijn werk, IT pipo, maak in aantekeningen tijdens gesprekken, vergaderingen en ook schrijf ik vaak dingen op en problemen voor mezelf helder te krijgen.

Ik bewaar al deze notitieboeken. Ik heb een hele plank vol. Vanaf ongeveer 1998 ben ik ze gaan bewaren.

Van de ontwerptekeningen in deze notitieboeken maak sinds kort kunstwerkjes.

Ook maak ik veel aantekeningen terwijl ik boeken lees, als ik iets meemaak, op vakantie, op reis, of als een soort journaling (maar zonder het ritueel). Ik markeer teksten en zaken die ik wil onthouden. Die schrijf ik dan later in een tekst in Evernote. En soms publiceer ik ze hier.

Ik heb ook lijstjes van boeken die ik ooit nog wil lezen, films die ik wil zien, en andere lijstjes. Ik heb een speciaal notitieboek in Evernote met lijstjes.

About Polaroids by Douglas Coupland

In a Douglas Coupland burp, I reread Shampoo Planet and now Polaroids.

What strikes me now: Coupland’s style and subject matter could never be European.

The description of “stuff”

Bret Easton Ellis exaggerated it in American Psycho with the overly exuberant description of the brands of Bateman’s stuff. But even in Coupland you notice that strange for us Europeans yet somewhat exotic way of describing consumer goods.

Polaroids, Douglas Coupland

His world is so unimaginably young to us

A legacy of a few hundred years is already immeasurably deep. After the freedom struggle, suddenly the most important event in the history of the United States (yes I know Coupland is a Canadian) is 9/11. And 9/11 is described as an attack on the United States. European history is teeming with 9/11 events. In the US, a president is assassinated every now and then, but Delaware, Arizona or even Texas did not secede from the US. In a documentary on illegals, I hear Americans talk about “our country” as something based on centuries of history. But most Americans have immigrated to the country in the last hundred years.

Rehab

Coupland (paraphrasing – I lost the exact quote):

When there is an electricity outage, we sing songs, but as soon as electricity is back, we disappear in a haze again.

So it is during this vacation. For example, there is no television. You find that you read a book more easily and chat more, and feel much freer than when that blue eye demands its attention. It’s like quitting drinking or smoking: a TV addiction is in your daily pattern, and it takes a paradigm shift to get rid of it.

About legacy: a little further on, I read that Palo Alto is 100 years old. I rest my case.

The Creativity Leap – Natalie Dixon

Via Seth Godin’s podcast. He called The Creativity Leap “even better” then his own, at that time not yet published book The Practice.

The Creativity Leap

The Creativity Leap is about activating the creative process in individuals and in organizations, and how creativity can transform people and organizations.

Invest in hobbies. Learn new things, cultivating a childlike, open outlook.

Seek out ideas from outside your normal world.

Creative ideas are formed during daydreaming, during doing nothing. On the other hand: practice makes perfect, without a lot of practice there is no mastery.

Learn to ask better questions. Start with “big picture” questions and then descend to specific questions.

Open-source collaboration and informal structures lead to cross-pollination and better solutions.

Research leads to better questions.

Practice improvisation and out-of-the-box thinking.

Have explicit attention to intuition; intuition is also a data point.

Work in communities.

Facilitate hybrid thinking; combine tech and artistic thinking, analog and digital.

Reuse, remix what is already there.

Make things within the constraints that are there. Creativity works best within constraints.

Get out of your brain. Look at yourself and things from a different angle. Get messy. Combine deep specialization with broad experience. Combine rationality with ambiguity. Combine a tight organization with a loose network organization.

Drift.