writing
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Trudging Towards Strawberry Fields
The day John Lennon sat down to write Strawberry Fields Forever, there’s a very high chance he didn’t expect to write what would be considered one of the best songs of all time, even if his ambition was to be regarded as one of the best songwriters of all time. He was just writing a…
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Who’s in the Box?
People and systems put us in boxes. Too often it’s convenient and in their interests, making their lives easier and allowing systems to operate with less friction. After all, it’s cognitively tiring to re-evaluate people and our own biased judgements time and time again. But people are complex, diverse, and transcend the simplistic categorisations we…
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Aphorism 29
It’s easy to have strong opinions and loose principles, but the aim is to achieve the opposite. The Thoughts of Others “I don’t have to believe everything I think. I don’t have to internalise every emotion I feel. When I start to form an opinion, that’s just a hypothesis. Let me go out into the world,…
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No Contradictions
No contradictions. What an absurd expectation to place upon a person or oneself. The desire to show up in the world free of contradiction can be paralysing, and it shelters us from mistakes and failures that may enlighten. It’s up to an artist to take stances, and then, if we’re open-minded enough, people and experiences…
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Hoarding Culture
Hoarding strikes me as being related to indecisiveness. Or, the very least, it’s tied up with an unwillingness and, in some cases, a chronic inability to decide. To avoid deciding now, I’ll take all I can and decide later. But, of course, it’s the negative side effects that make what seems like a good idea…
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Pulled into the Wrong Orbit
For a lot of artists when we start out, the gravitational pull is often getting better at the craft itself. We work to write a better class of song, draw a better painting, tell a more compelling story, and take a photograph that has emotional resonance But as we take our work to the world…
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Leaning into Resistance
I wrote the following last year but forgot to post it at the time. Having stumbled across it the other day, I realised that it was still relevant to me – a helpful reminder, actually – and, therefore, probably worth sharing. ———— Last week, as the sun emerged and big events descended on Cardiff, I…
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The Art of Deciding
It’s easier than ever to collect information, but at what point do we decide to stop collecting and start to apply it in a meaningful way? The stream of self-help content, for example, will never run out, but that doesn’t necessarily make it helpful. Central to this problem is the art of decisiveness, which we…
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Aphorism 28
The people who refuse to consume culture passively are the ones who drive it forward. Culture isn’t something we should let happen to us, we should direct it. The Thoughts of Others “You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win.” – Steve Jobs
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Fearless Fans
It’s easy to focus on the fact that many creatives can find themselves stifled by a fear of putting their ideas into the world. Things like trying to perfect projects for too long and sitting on ideas without ever taking the plunge are a few that I’ve succumbed to from time to time. But there’s…