Mainly about media, humans and advertising, but so much more than that. 

Read a great commentary on the subject by only dead fish

Having the title "creative" attached to your job description sets high expectations. 

From the outside-in means that you need to (you are expected to) be creative 24-7. I guess we share this with comedians who are always expected to be funny, no matter where or with who.

From the inside-out is more a "curse"... your brain is always on, generating ideas, connecting dots, seeing possiblities. Is a life spend in tension with our environment.

All this just means that we are a complex mind to understand, even by our own. 

Most creative people, the ones that are truly creative (not by title but by action) are most times unaware of the workings of their own personality, our own mind or even our own behavior.

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So who better than psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to bring some clarity into the subject:

Here are the 10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also often quiet and at rest.

2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.

3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.

5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted.

6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. 

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.

8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.

9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.

10. Creative people's openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment. 

In his 1878 book Human, All Too Human he wrote:

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration…shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects…All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

via Jonah Lehrer 

Today's surprise was a post about parenthood. Specifically Jeff Atwood’s on what it means to be a parent.

Many can relate to the subject, but having spent a few "play-dates" with Tina and her beautiful children, the post and the subject inspired me to write about parenthood too.

@hazeliz and I have 5 kids. They challenge our foundations like nothing I have ever experienced before. Patience sometimes works, but sometimes it doesn't. Getting very serious sometimes works and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes 1 cries, and other times the 3 of them cry... at the same time. They demand and request and plead and negotiate and bargain with you all day long. yet, I can't imagine life without them.

My favorite part of Jeff's post is this paragraph, which I think says it all.

When I am holding Henry and I tickle him, I can feel him laughing all the way to his toes. And I realize, my God, I had forgotten, I had completely forgotten how unbelievably, inexplicably wonderful it is that any of us exist at all. Here I am with this tiny, warm body so close to me, breathing so fast he can barely catch up, sharing his newfound joy of simply being alive with me. The sublime joy of this moment, and all the other milestones – the first smile, the first laugh, the first "dada" or "mama", the first kiss, the first time you hold hands. The highs are so incredibly high that you'll get vertigo and wonder if you can ever reach that feeling again. But you peak ever higher and higher, with dizzying regularity. Being a new parent is both terrifying and exhilarating, a constant rollercoaster of extreme highs and lows. 

And with that emotion you close your eyes most days. 

Soon to be opened by a little hand poking you in the chest: I'm thirsty!

A rollercoaster indeed. Is there anything more exhilirating!!!

via microsiervos

I interview a lot of creative professionals: Art directors, designers, copywriters, interactive designers, developers, planners and strategists, producers and I even get to talk to account people.

In most cases I don't follow the "resume-driven" script. I much rather look for non scripted answers. I look for the real drivers, the human needs not just needing a job.

I honestly love interviewing candidates, but most of the times I'm left with a dissapointed feeling. I think people for the most part don't prepare well for an interview.

This is more tragic when we think that in advertising, branding is the most important concept one must understand.

Personal branding, just like corporate branding is mostly about differentiation and to be substantially different is about knowing yourself.

I thought that I could help potential candidates by providing a list of questions, which answers could help you during the process of branding yourself:

• What value are you working on?
• What do you do to build, manage and maintain your network?
• If I Google you, what will I find?
• What is the last thing you created?
• What do you do to expose yourself to new ideas and new thinking on a regular basis?
• What keeps you awake at night? 
• What's your goal?

I shared the passion with Caterina.  

Monoculture: How one story is changing everything, is the type of book you keep on talking about, quoting and recommending to people, weeks after you finished it.

The book shows how the economic story is the master narrative that shapes our culture in the modern age, and that resisting that monoculture is the way to human dignity and freedom. 

Caterina reminded me about the interesting research is being done by Peter Pruzan in business ethics at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark:

Management professor Peter Pruzan facilitated a workshop fot the executives of a company known for hierarchical control and an emphasis on shareholders, not stakeholders. Pruzan gave these executives, flown in from eight Western countries, a list of ‘values’ like success, love, professional competency, honesty, trust, wealth creativity and power, and asked them to reflect on which ones were most important in their personal lives. They were to discuss their selections in small groups and then list the group’s top five selections in small groups and then list the group’s top five personal values. Later that day, the executives were asked to reflect on the company’s most important values–not the ones officially promoted, but the implicit ones underlying decisions about hiring and firing employees, entering and leaving markets, advertising, lobbying, or negotiating with unions.

When the groups compared their lists of personal and corporate values, everyone realized that within each group the two sets of values were completely different. The executives’ personal values tended to include terms like ‘good health’, ‘honesty’, ‘beauty’, ‘love’, and ‘peace of mind’ and the organizational values included words like ‘success’, ‘power’, ‘competitiveness’, ‘efficiency’, and ‘productivity’. … the gap between a leader’s personal values and the values he or she promotes at work is so extreme, Pruzan said, that leaders have unconsciously developed a modern form of schizophrenia, threatening the health of both the leader and the organization.

Here’s a link to one of his papers: The Question of Organizational Consciousness: Can Organizations Have Values, Virtues and Visions?. 

It's a short but intense book that its worth your time. 

A group of designers came together to bring to life the essence of times: Action.

Tim McCracken

Natty Coleman

Jason Hines

David Pfluger 

Christopher Michon

Joe Bacigalupo

 The most important and obvious reason why we kiss is that it facilitates reproduction. Women, who according to studies place more emphasis and importance on a kiss, use the mouth-to-mouth moment as a way to judge the taste of the tongue, lips and saliva to see if she is with an adequate mate.

Sense of smell doesn’t just provide a window into hygiene habits, it also gives women access to the unseen DNA of their chosen mate. According to recent studies, women can smell when a man’s group of genes that manage the immune system, called MHC, are matched well to her own. Scientists theorize that kissing may be so ubiquitous because it gives women an instant check on if there is chemistry, literally (or less poetic terms, if they would make good children together).

As seen on Good from Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us.