Beenish Khan's Tumblr

I came up with four questions to help me decide who got to read my work when it was in its most vulnerable stages:

- Do I trust this person's taste and judgment?

- Does this person understand what I'm trying to create here?

- Does this person genuinely want me to succeed?

- Is this person capable of delivering the truth to me in a sensitive and compassionate manner?

Is Apple's advertising slogan wrong? Should it have been “Think differently”?

Linking verbs, such as “to be,” “to seem,” “to taste,” and “to look,” often describe a state of being or feeling. Usage expert Bryan Garner explains them this way: “These verbs connect a descriptive word with the subject; hence the descriptive word following the linking verb describes the subject and not the verb” (1). For instance, in the sentence “He is handsome,” the linking verb “is” connects “He,” the subject, to “handsome,” an adjective.

Conjunction Junction, what's your function? 

The Schoolhouse Rock videos are a great way to remember the functions of the parts of speech. 

The plural of girl is girls, house's is houses, etc. But plural of stimulus is stimuli. Hmmm, so what's the plural of Octopus? Octopuses or Octopi ?

- A shiver of sharks - A murder of crows - A parliament of owls - A pride of lions - A gaggle of geese

Christian Rudder, Dataclysm

Christian Rudder, the President of OkCupid (a dating site,) took up the data, ran analysis and is now telling us all about racism, love, and relationship in the United States of America.

I don’t come here with more hype or reportage on the data phenomenon. I come with the thing itself: the data, phenomenon stripped away. I come with a large store of the actual information that’s being collected, which luck, work, wheedling, and more luck have put me in the unique position to possess and analyse.

I’ve never been on an online date in my life and neither have any of the other founders, and if it’s not for you, believe me, I get that. Tech evangelism is one of my least favorite things, and I’m not here to trade my blinking digital beads for anyone’s precious island. I still subscribe to magazines. I get the Times on the weekend. Tweeting embarrasses me. I can’t convince you to use, respect, or “believe in” the Internet or social media any more than you already do—or don’t. By all means, keep right on thinking what you’ve been thinking about the online universe. But if there’s one thing I sincerely hope this book might get you to reconsider, it’s what you think about yourself. Because that’s what this book is really about. OkCupid is just how I arrived at the story.

He states,

A flaw is a powerful thing. Even at the person-to-person level, to be universally liked is to be relatively ignored. To be disliked by some is to be loved all the more by others.

Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative

I am sceptic of self-help books, but lately a lot of good ones are coming in the market. The Accidental Creative, by Todd Henry, is one of them. If you are in the business of creating things, and coming up with new ideas, then this book is for you. It gives practical advice on how to have a sustainable lifestyle with regards to creativity, and how to avoid a burnout.

Todd's formula for being sustainably brilliant is,

 Prolific + Brilliant + Healthy = producing great work consistently and in a sustainable way.

According to him, the creative rhythm is set by working on following five elements :

Focus

In order to do our best work, we need to learn to pay attention to what's in front of us and to develop the capacity to stay focused on our objective.

Energy

Like a gambler who falls behind and needs to wager bigger and bigger amounts to get back to even, the creative in the risky habit of ignoring energy puts himself in a seemingly impossible situation.

Relationships

The key to cultivating creatively stimulating relationships is threefold : you need relationships in your life in which you can be real, you need relationships in your life in which you can learn to risk, and you need relationships in your life in which you can learn to submit.

Stimuli

A[] key benefit of being purposeful about the stimuli in your life is that you can direct your mind to begin working on problems before your need for ideas become urgent.

Hours

To spend our time effectively means that we are willing to view our time as a portfolio of investments, not as a slot machine.

On Unnecessary Creating (eg. Keeping a journal, painting for yourself):

One benefit of Unnecessary Creating is that it gives you the opportunity to regularly experience the phenomenon referred to as "flow." This is a term coined by researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe the sensation of "getting lost" in your work. One of the main contributors to flow is doing work that challenges your skills and requires your full creative capacity. When this happens, you lose all sense of time, becoming completely immersed in what you're doing. People who experience flow regularly report that they are able to access parts of their creative capacity that remain dormant during their less challenging work because they aren't required to take risks or stretch themselves.