8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: [06] Resumes & Resources

How creative practices make you better at your job, a better employee and a better colleague to others.

Chapter List

  • Start Writing

    At the heart of this blog, the core of this little creative project I’ve been working on here, there is but a single message burning with the inner heat that drives the whole damn thing: it is one piece of advice. Start writing.

    Oh, I get it. You don’t have the passion or the time or the urge or the patience. 

    That device in your hands is so great at capturing your attention and entertaining you with the ideas and thoughts of other people—or maybe now I should include algorithms and slop—that you can’t be bothered to use it to make something.

    But writing is at the core of creativity. It is the uber-skill that shapes and refines all the others. 

    Writing is the materialization of thoughts—reflective and critical, personal and communicative, coherent and scattered—upon the page.

    Writing makes you better at evaluating yourself and whatever you do. 

    Writing closes the loop and fills the gap and bridges the points of something you cannot articulate is missing in your soul until you start writing.

    It’s not difficult.

    Open any app that takes text: your notes, your word-processor, hell, write yourself an email… but write something. And then write some more. And keep writing after that. It will improve you in ways you cannot fathom until you’ve written enough to see it for yourself.

  • Publish Owner

    Publish on your Own Site…

    …Syndicate Everywhere.

    Leave it to Cory Doctorow to drop mention[1] of a content phenomenon that has been haunting my efforts for over a decade. 

    Among the most insidious of things that social media does to creators (and that’s a long list) is fool people who write words and make—shudder—content to share online, is to quietly neglect to remind any of us that we lose ownership the second we click the post button on any those sites.

    No really.

    They’ll pretend like you can edit and curate and delete and archive, but if you post on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or LinkedIn or any of a thousand other smaller platforms, they will hand wave around your ownership and rights, but in reality you have few.

    I call these places corporate social media for a reason: you are handing over your content not to a community of users but to the corporation that owns the software, server, and algorithms. They can show people what you created if and when they choose, they can censor you, and (as I have witnessed in the outrage rant by many creators over the years who have suffered because of it) they can delete your entire account for vague reasons that they may or may not choose to explain.

    We’re not going to change that.

    But Doctorow has an acronym for an idea I’ve been screaming from my blogs for years: POSSE or Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

    Or simply, as a creator, it is incumbent upon you to figure out how to make your own central place to keep the things you make—a website, basically—and then syndicate, promote, link, cast, or otherwise surface from there, if for no other reason than you should keep control of ownership of it with every ounce of your digital strength.

    This is a cross-post from of Poets & Processors.

  • Resumes Resources

    I served my time in the white collar world of desk job, and while I can’t tell as I write these words if I’ll ever go back to being a salaryman poking numbers into spreadsheets, composing jargon-strewn emails to colleagues, and hosting countless meetings about project status updates, I can suggest that I’ve been there.

    Your experience will vary.

    There is a kind of unique uniformity to working in a desk job: they are all somehow the same, but then too, everyone has an experience that requires the caveat that you can never quite be certain what will happen next in those jobs.

    What I do know is that the uniformity can often work in the favour of creative souls. 

    Creative practices not only build skills and talents that make one stand out from the crowd, but many of those hobbies, habit and creative pursuits develop in parallel to skills that employers drool over. 

    Again, your experience will vary. Your boss may not care. Your company may crave conformity. Your job may require the precise opposite of creativity. But for many, creative pursuits and practices make you better at your job, a better employee and a better colleague to others.

    Under the category of Resumes & Resources I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Post Haste

    I’m going to let you peek behind the curtain for a moment and remind you that sometimes creativity is smoke and mirrors, too.

    Truth is, I write these words weeks in advance of you reading them.

    Writing a daily blog is not always just about the dedicated day-after-day work of coming up with new ideas and then sitting down at a keyboard. Rather, sometimes it’s about working smarter and planning ahead. Sometimes it’s about organization and staging and schedules. Sometimes it’s a business plan.

    You want a life skill? You want to be better at a desk job? You want to get into a corporate strategic mindset? You want to learn how to get stuff done on a schedule? Oh, you can read about it in a textbook or download a course on business planning. 

    But might I suggest that you try instead a big creative project.

    Make a weekly web comic that demands you create on a schedule and manage a website.

    Join a band and try to release a demo that involves scheduling, promotion and technical skills.

    Write a novel that insists on long term strategic planning and holding big scope ideas in your head.

    I write these posts sometimes weeks in advance and try to keep between five and ten in my publication queue. Not only does that save me from rushing to write something on topic on every busy morning, but it gives me time to edit and hone and shuffle and plan out how I am making this site.

    It’s strategy. It’s planning. It’s bigger.

    And it’s more than creativity: it’s resume fodder, too.

  • Strange Runs

    I took up distance running seriously in 2008, shortly after my daughter was born. I had been dabbling in the sport for a decade previous, but right around new years and that time of making resolutions I signed up to join a training clinic at the local running supply store. Nearly two decades later I’ve run tens of thousands of kilometres, completed hundreds of races, and found a network of people who are some of my closest friends.

    Being a runner also had a strange effect at the office. 

    There were enough of us runners that we found each other. In meetings, in the lunch room, or by winks and nudges from others who relayed that “did you know so and so is a runner, too?”

    This is not a post about running. 

    This is a post about networking.

    Taking up a sport, a hobby or a creative passion and being open about that in your professional life has a weird and magical way of interconnecting us in the otherwise dispassionate spaces of the work world. 

    …not that this is some deep insight. Shared interests forge tribes, after all. 

     But while you could just as easily find that tribe talking about a great band or the local sports club, finding out that your coworkers are aspiring authors, avid photographers, spending their evenings composing music, or just own a really expensive running watch, too, is a different level of camaraderie that shouldn’t be overlooked by creative spirits.