Renaissance Life

“There is no science in creativity. If you don’t give yourself room to fail, you won’t innovate.” Bob Iger It’s okay if you have no idea what you are doing — No one truly does. Not completely. We’re all making decisions based on the best guesses we can give based on our experiences, knowledge, and information we have to go on. Even the people who have ‘made it’ aren’t immune to the uncertainty…

Whether we realize it or not, every day is a commitment to something. To family, to specific work, to a lifestyle. As many have saved, our time is our most important finite resource. And our schedule highlights what we deem important. That is if we think about it. Often there are things our calendars we do, that given a thought or alternative, we would choose something different. We want to…

The joy of figuring things out. The passion from creating meaningful things. The enjoyment of consistent routine. The thrill of experimenting. The peace of making something with your hands. And the happiness of sharing your work with others. To create a meaningful life, focus on the pursuit, not the wins and losses. Money enables, but it shouldn’t be the end-all. If we can align what we do…

It’s hard to give when you’ve got nothing left. If you’re like me, it’s easy to forget your needs and instead focus on the needs of others. (Humblebrag?) And it’s always easy to pour your energy into things that don’t fulfill you. It’s not necessarily the giving that’s the problem, but the lack of receiving. Giving can be just as energizing as receiving. But if you aren’t giving yourself the…

One of the joys of being a designer is taking an idea and making it a reality. Turning a simple sketch or (random) product name into an actual tangible thing. Or at least taking it a step closer. The thing I have to be careful about is not getting too attached to whatever random ideas pop into my head each day. Ideas are currency. But only with focus and effort. With the time and resources I…

Stress needs a release valve. Bottling up stress, day after day, with no outlet, wreaks havoc on our minds and physical well-being. Exercise (any type of movement really) is a great way to relieve stress. It might seem obvious, but obvious answers are usually the most straightforward and effective methods of action. Mediation or moving meditations like Yoga is another go-to for me. Especially…

If you feel called to do something, then removing the barriers stopping you should be one of your biggest priorities. If money is the problem, mastering money is part of the solution. Read every insightful book on money you can get your hands on. Apply what you learn. Live below your means, while also increasing your means. You might find that money was a problem but was masking the real…

You don’t need to already be great to learn to be great. Even a little effort done consistently goes a long way toward adding up to something great. I don’t care what your genes say, or how much talent you have or don’t have. Mastering a skill requires effort and persistence. If you practice those and are willing to put in the time, greatness is inevitable. Vincent van Gogh has said it best,…

“If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness, and fears.” Glenn Clark There’s so much mental weight we tend to carry with us from creative endeavor to the next. Every idea unfinished can easy weigh on us, especially when we don’t let them go. I’m dealing with this now. There are so many ideas and interesting projects I want…

As a designer and developer, one of the easiest traps you can fall into is always learning new programming languages or tools, but never using them to build things. There are over 700+ programming languages out there. What happens is you learn one, hear something exciting about a new language, and you start learning that one instead of using the first. And so we hop from one language to the…

Everyone has opinions. Everyone has opinions about their opinions. I have an opinion, you have an opinion—he, she, we, it, they, the royal we—we’ve all got em. Your family definitely has opinions about your new haircut, what you should do for a living, how you should eat right, who you should date, among other things. Your coworkers have opinions about work ethic, about what work is supposed to…

Jumping off the bandwagon happens in an instant. Whoops didn’t see that coming. A moment of weakness or inhibition or pressure. Or more often just being too busy. But so does jumping back on the bandwagon. All it takes is a moment, a leap, a stance, a willingness to try. That goes for exercise, sleep, a side project, staying connected, etc. If you fall off the path then you get up and get…

Picture this: You’re a king when it comes to building habits. You’ve set out to do something good for yourself and you’re doing well and feeling confident. Nothing can go wrong. But after two weeks without a single drink, you bend to peer pressure on day 15 and have a bottle of wine with a few friends. Or after journalling every night for the last year, you unintentionally fall asleep and miss…

Unhealthy Habits part 2 The unhealthiest habits are the ones you don’t know you are doing (or worse — you think they are good for you). I like to picture habits weighed on a balance scale. How do my good habits outweigh my bad habits? And more specifically, how does each individual habit’s value outweigh its disvalue? My rule of thumb is to start by focusing on adding good habits first,…

One of the hardest moments of any daily habit — besides missing a day after a long streak of consecutive days in a row — is when you would rather do anything, anything, else than your habit. You know what I’m talking about. When it’s time to put on your shoes and head to the gym or go for a run and then a wave of dread creeps in. ‘Maybe I should just wait until tomorrow to go…’. Or when you are…

When it comes to sticking to daily habits, I find it helpful to not set a strict deadline on what time in the day I should do them. Ideally, I’d write in the morning when I’m feeling fresh and caffeinated, but the ideal isn’t always in the cards. You would think that having a precise time in the day for a habit would be good (sometimes it is) but often it can derail and undermine our…

“Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers” — Franz Kafka, Novelist Before I started writing every day, there were all types of reasons (excuses) I would tell — no, convince — myself why I couldn’t. I was essentially working two full jobs,…