Chance the Rapper: Creative Constraints Are Everywhere

Chicago’s Chance the Rapper (real name: Chance Bennett) has been making waves in the hip-hop world with his critically acclaimed mixtapes. Chance’s story should sound familiar to all creatives, he was certain he had the talent to make it, but was struggling to break through. However it took some heart-breaking news to jumpstart his ambition. In 2011, one of his close friend’s was stabbed. Also, around the same time, Chance was suspended from school for 10 days. Chance’s father then offered the challenge that changed his life: advance your fledging rap career or get serious about school. From the Chicago Reader: “Right after that I started being in the studio every day,” Bennett says. “Didn’t really go out anymore, stopped doing all the drugs I used to do—it changed my whole life around. It was a very sobering event.” His father noticed too: “His performances were entirely different,” [his father] says. “He understood his mortality.”

Hurry Ruins Saints As Well As Artists

One of the dangers of being a creative professional—someone whose job requires constantly churning out creative work—is that it’s easy to become numb to the beauty of creativity. What was once a blessing can start to feel like a curse. In our new 99U book, Todd Henry of the Accidental Creative makes a compelling case for the “Act of Unnecessary Creation,” which essentially means taking time out of your day (or your week) to slow down and focus on creative side projects as a healthy counterpoint to client work. Henry believes that Unnecessary Creation protects your mental mojo and develops your creative voice: You and I are not machines, and no matter how efficient we become at delivering brilliant work, we need regular reminders of our capacity to contribute something unique. We need to stay in touch with the intrinsic desire to strive for the “next” that has driven progress throughout the ages. The twentieth-century mystic Thomas Merton wrote, “There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular—and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.” Merton elegantly articulates how the pressure of the create-on-demand world can cause us to look sideways at our peers and competitors instead of looking ahead. The process of discovering and refining your voice takes time. Unnecessary Creation grants you the space to discover your unique aptitudes and passions through a process of trial, error, and play that won’t often be afforded to you otherwise. Initiating a project with no parameters and no expectations from others also forces you to stay self-aware while learning to listen to and follow your intuition.

Bill Watterson: Invent Your Life’s Meaning

Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, in a commencement speech to Kenyon College on pursuing what matters: Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them. To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.

Pay It Forward: Why Generosity Is The Key To Success

Personal connections are the currency of the working world. Like or not, who we know, who we owe, and who owes us determines our future as much as talent. When it comes to when and how we help others, most of us fit into one of three categories: Givers, who help others unconditionally, demanding nothing in return. Matchers, who usually only help those who have helped them. Takers, those who demand help but never offer. Penn professor Adam Grant is a Giver. He’s also the youngest tenured professor at Wharton and is the author of the best-selling Give and Take. Grant believes that the success of our careers is due to our generosity with our time and knowledge. Givers, he says, are usually either at the top or bottom of their field, with Matchers and Takers sprinkled in between. After publicly proclaiming to the world that he answers any and all favor requests in the New York Times, Grant is the best test case for his own theory. However, Grant manages it all well thanks to being ruthless with his time. I asked him how he handles the deluge and if he has any advice for those of us who feel too squeezed to be good “Givers.” — In the book, you write that Givers are either at the very top of their field or at the bottom. How do you make sure your giving helps, not hurts, your career? Your effectiveness with giving depends largely on your time management skills. The main thing is to block out time for individual work and then time to be helpful. I have a particular day where I don’t answer any phone calls or emails. That day I’m writing, reading, or pushing forward one of my individual responsibilities. Then there are days where I block out time just to be helpful. It’s more efficient, less distracting, and lets me maintain a balance. I try to focus on five-minute favors as micro-loans of my time. When something comes in, I ask myself if I’m in the position to help uniquely or can I pass them along to someone who might be more helpful. Sometimes, I farm the requests out to people that are in a better place to help. I imagine people constantly want to pay you back. Well, especially with the Matchers, but most people feel pressed to pay you back. I try not to ask them to pay it back, I try to ask them to pay it forward. Usually in the case of helping me help others. It’s really great to have a network of people willing to give back to be helpful. “I try to focus on five-minute favors as micro-loans of my time.” It’s like you’re making a loan and getting interest. But even if they “pay” it elsewhere that’s emotionally fulfilling for you. It is. The other aspect is that, when you encourage enough people to pay it forward, especially in certain networks [or workplaces], the norm spreads a little bit and more people get the help they need. If everyone is a taker, you have widespread paranoia, and you don’t get a lot of help or problem-solving. If everyone is a matcher, you can only go to the people that have helped in the past. If everyone is a giver you can go the person who is the best expert or most qualified to help. That helps everybody. That’s the benefit. You can create a more efficient exchange of ideas and resources. Blocking out days to give sounds good, but what if my job is more regimented? There are Fortune 500 companies where a group of engineers would have “quiet time.” Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. they’d have a no-interruption rule. You can negotiate those kinds of policies or practices. Some people put up out-of-office replies that say, “I’m working on a really important project for the next four hours. If you really need me, please call me.” Do that and you’ll get emails back saying, “Oh we resolved this, don’t worry about it.” Or “I saw you were out of office, I really respect the fact that you prioritize important work. This is something I can follow up next week on.” It’s a good way to get people to respect your boundaries and it means that when you do make time for them, they appreciate it more. You advocate being ruthless with your time. How have you seen that play out? Whenever someone asks me for a meeting the first thing I ask back is, “What the agenda for this meeting and what contributions can be expected from me?” It’s amazing. Half the time they can’t answer. I have it as an auto-script at this point that I just paste in. What’s fascinating is that I often hear back, “Oh, I just really thought you wanted to be there.” And I say, “I appreciate you being polite, but if it’s no difference to you, I prefer not to be included.” Related to that is to say, “I’ve been completely deluged with requests for meetings and if I took them all I’d get nothing done. What I’d appreciate is if you could write a couple of sentences about the contribution you’re looking for. I’ll do my best to provide it directly or connect you with someone who can.” I imagine doing this with meetings may seem combative, but people respect you more. It’s an open question. I hope so. I’m sure some people say, “This guy espouses Giver principles and doesn’t live by them.” My response there is, “I never said I should help all the people, all the time, with all the requests.” My priority is family first, students second, colleagues third. Everybody else comes fourth. If I can’t fulfill my commitment to those first three groups, that meeting is not something I’m going to be making time for. You’ve seen thousands of students over the course of your career. You’ve also consulted with the world’s best executives. What are the skills that you feel people in college aren’t getting that they need in the “real world”? I had an office hours conversation with a student who had just joined her 17th club. There’s no way you can meaningfully participate in seventeen clubs. This is the “fear of missing out” concept. It’s perverse, but the more you fear missing out, the more you actually miss out. Then you are peripherally participating in a bunch of things and have no meaningful engagement in anything. “The more you fear missing out, the more you actually miss out.” Another thing that comes up is teaching students how to fail. Undergrads especially have this idea that they have to excel at everything they do. They say, “I need this pristine track record where everything I have ever tried has succeeded.” Obviously, that closes off learning opportunities. And that makes them less successful in the long run because they never discover their weaknesses. They never experiment with anything that’s not comfortable and it makes them less well-rounded and prepared for a complicated world. There’s evidence that recruiters discriminate against 4.0′s. They’d much rather have a 3.8 who had a life. There’s a stigma that you’re a loser or perfectionist if you got perfect grades. That coping with failure is a lost art.

How Nathaniel Philbrick Writes

National Book Award-winner and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Nathaniel Philbrick details to The Paris Review his writing process. Philbrick writes historical non-fiction, so he often has to dive head first into topics and develop a mastery while maintaining a sense of wonder. As a result he has a pretty regimented process to assure things come out right. Some choice gems: On taking notes: Moleskine. It’s almost a reading journal. Day by day. Early on I’m getting a sense of the book. I find that when I’m new to a topic, that’s when I’m catching the best details. It’s all new to me; it’s what the reader will respond to. Because, you can so easily over-know a topic, and you lose the magic. It becomes interesting to you, but you’ve lost the connection to the reader. You’re too far down the rabbit hole. So for me, it’s having a record of those initial reactions to the material is really important. It’s the roadmap I go back to. You forgot how interesting the material was when you first learned it, after you’ve learned a lot about a topic. On getting feedback: So, after I finish a draft, I hit print. I used to do a lot more revising on the page. I used to print at the end of every day, and then the next morning revise. I’ve since gotten to the point where I just do the revising on the screen. I print out the whole chapter, edit it, spend a day looking it over, then reprint it, and take upstairs and read it aloud to my wife after dinner. [Paris Review:] Out loud? That is the most critical point. She has a notepad where she’s writing comments. It’s so funny—you can look at things on the screen, and it looks great. Then you read it, and you go, oh my God. The rhythm of the prose is something I’m really trying to work on. So when I’m reading it aloud, I’ll hear the prose and go, that sucks. Like for all of us, I’m always searching for a word. It’s a lot of the sounds I’m going for—not that I’m creating anything anyone notices. On the importance of the preface: What I should mention is that, what applied to Away Off Shore and all my books since, is that, for me, it’s the preface that matters. That’s where I develop the voice; that’s where figure out what I’m going to say. Well into the Moleskine approach, I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to begin with. What scene will introduce what I’m trying to do. That’s really hard for me. I’ll have forty drafts of how I’m going to start the book. Forty different ways in. How about trying this way, how about that? And that’s really the hard part. I’m deconstructing myself, second guessing myself. Where am I coming from? What is this about? What’s the voice? The tone? My manila folder for the preface is always really fat.

The Perfect Workspace

The spaces we occupy shape who we are and how we behave. This has serious consequences for our psychological well-being and creative performance. Given that many of us spend years working in the same room, or even at the same desk, it makes sense to organize and optimize that space in the most beneficial ways possible. When it comes to building your workspace you can aim for the trendy look and flick through some interior design mags, or you can let science guide the way. Based on recent psychology and neuroscience findings, here are some simple and effective steps you can take once to improve your productivity for years: Take ownership of your workspace The simple act of making your own decisions about how to organize your workspace has an empowering effect and has been linked with improved productivity. Craig Knight, Director of the Identity Realization workplace consultancy, showed this in a 2010 study with Alex Haslam involving 47 office workers in London. Those workers given the opportunity to arrange a small office with as many or few plants and pictures as they wanted were up to 32 percent more productive than others not given this control. They also identified more with their employer, a sign of increased commitment to the team effort and increased efficiency. If you are an office manager this suggests you should give your staff as much input into the design of their office and immediate workspace as possible. Many companies even give their employees a small amount of money to furnish their space. Alternatively, if you’re a creative in an open-plan office, try to find ways to make your mark on your immediate environment. Even the simple use of a pin-board to post your own pictures and messages could help you feel that the space is yours with consequent benefits for your work. Choose rounded furniture and arrange it wisely If you have the luxury of designing your own workspace, consider choosing a layout and furniture that is curved and rounded rather than sharp and straight-edged. Creating this environment has been linked with positive emotions, which is known to be beneficial for creativity and productivity (added bonus: there’s also less chance of knocking an elbow or knee on a sharp corner). In a 2011 study, hundreds of undergrads looked at computer-generated pictures of room interiors and rated those filled with curvilinear (rounded), as opposed to rectilinear, furniture as more pleasing and inviting. Another study out this year found that people rated curvy, rounded environments as more beautiful than straight-edged rectilinear environments and that the rounded spaces triggered more activity in brain regions associated with reward and aesthetic appreciation. This contrast between straight edges and curves also extends to the way we arrange our furniture. Apparently, King Arthur was on to something: sitting in circles provokes a collective mindset, whereas sitting in straight lines triggers feelings of individuality – something worth thinking about at your next meeting if you want to encourage team cohesion. Apparently, King Arthur was on to something: sitting in circles provokes a collective mindset. Take advantage of color, light and space Choosing the right color and lighting scheme for your office is one of the simplest ways your environment can enhance your performance. Different colors and light levels have different psychological effects, so the ideal situation is to install a lighting system that allows you to alter the hue and brightness of your room to suit the kind of work that you’re engaged in. For instance, exposure to both blue and green has been shown to enhance performance on tasks that require generating new ideas. However, the color red has been linked with superior performance on tasks involving attention to detail. Another study out this year showed that a dimmer environment fostered superior creativity in terms of idea generation, probably because it encourages a feeling of freedom. On the other hand, brighter light levels were more conducive to analytical and evaluative thinking. Not as easy to modify, but ceiling height has also been shown to have psychological effects. A 2007 study found that a higher ceiling was associated with feelings of freedom, together with a more abstract and relational thinking style that helped participants see the commonalities between objects and concepts. Make use of plants and windows If you only do one thing to optimize your workspace, invest in a green plant or two. Research has repeatedly shown that the presence of office plants has a range of benefits including helping workers recover from demanding activities and lowering stress levels. As a bonus, there’s also evidence that plants can reduce office pollution levels. Another feature of an optimized office is a window with a view, preferably of a natural landscape. This is because a glance at the hills or a lake recharges your mind. Obviously a view of nature isn’t possible for many people who work in cities, but even in an urban situation, a view of trees or intricate architecture have both been linked with restorative benefits. If you can’t negotiate a desk with a view, another plan is to choose an office in your building that’s the shortest stroll from an urban park. A visit here will revitalize your mind and compensate for your lack of a view. If you only do one thing to optimize your workspace, invest in a green plant or two. The benefits of a messy desk There’s a lot of pressure these days to be organized. How are you supposed to get your work done if you can’t even find a clear space on your desk to roll a mouse or place a plant? But new research suggests Einstein may have been onto something when he opined: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” Kathleen Vohs and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota found that participants tested in a messy room at a desk covered with paper came up with more imaginative uses for a ping pong ball than participants tested in a tidy room. This matches the views of consultant Craig Knight who has argued against the modern trend for “lean” workspaces. “We don’t understand psychologically why putting someone in an impoverished space should work, when it doesn’t work for any other animal on the planet,” he said recently. It also fits with the advice from Eric Abrahamson – co-author of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder – who says people with highly ordered desks often struggle to find things because their filing systems are so complicated. He also points out a key advantage to a mess – you can find things in it that you didn’t expect. Discovering that ground-breaking idea you scribbled on a piece of paper two years ago could be just the spark to get your next project off the ground. *** It’s easy to neglect the importance of your workspace, especially if you’re under pressure of deadlines and not so into interior design. But hopefully this review has convinced you that the spaces we occupy really can affect us psychologically. It’s vital that you choose an office space that you feel happy and comfortable in. If your freedom is restricted, shape the space as much as you can to make it your own. Get your surroundings in order and the rest is sure to follow.

You Are Bad At Assessing People

We like to think we are objective, rational people when it comes time to hire a new employee, evaluate an existing member of your team, or form a new partnership. We are confident we can assess people based on their merits. But in reality, we easily succumb to a well-documented and much-researched cognitive bias known as “the halo effect.” In 1920, the psychologist Edward L. Thorndike published a study showing that employees, soldiers, teachers, and aviators all seemed oddly similar across a variety of seemingly unrelated attributes on performance reviews. For example, highly reliable workers were also rated as being highly intelligent. Unkempt soldiers were rated as being physically weak. Enthusiastic teachers were also prompt, and prompt teachers showed integrity. Thorndike was skeptical, especially of the ratings of pilots who were routinely evaluated very highly in just about every category. The pilots were thus recommended for leadership roles despite being young and lacking in the sort of training a military leadership position requires. Thorndike realized that flying aces were great at doing something that was impressive, and it provided them with something he called a “halo of general merit.” The halo influenced commanders’ assessments and raised the ratings of all their other traits, including those that got them jobs they were not qualified to hold. He called it the halo effect. The halo influenced commanders’ assessments and raised the ratings of all their other traits, including those that got them jobs they were not qualified to hold. When contemplating something complex, your evaluation of one highly salient trait creates an invisible halo that taints how you perceive other unrelated and less-salient traits. For example, when scientists told subjects a photo attached to an essay was of the author (it wasn’t), subjects who saw attractive people in the photographs rated it as being better written than did people who saw a less attractive person in a photo attached to the same essay. This is possibly why taller people make more money. One 2004 study showed that for every extra inch of height above normal a person earns on-average an extra $789 a year. This is also why candidates for president eat corndogs at state fairs. It makes them seem nice and approachable. A halo of niceness and approachability makes a person seem trustworthy enough to have access to nuclear launch codes The effect is not always positive. Researchers once asked two groups of students to watch two different interviews of the same professor who spoke with a Belgian accent (think Jean-Claude Van Damme). In one video, the professor pretended to be laid-back and aloof. In the other, he pretended to be mean and strict. About half of the students who believed the professor was easygoing also said his accent was endearing, yet among the group who believed he was a hard-ass about 80 percent said his accent was grating. Objectively, of course, the accent was neither good or bad, but the halo made it so. This is possibly why taller people make more money. If you find yourself rating a person, product, or company positively or negatively across the board on every characteristic and attribute, know that you are likely experiencing the halo effect. The important thing to remember about this phenomenon is that you can’t avoid its influence, but you can learn to recognize when you are under its spell and how to avoid its enchantment.