Card designed by Stephen JB Thomas from the Noun Project

As we do every Friday, we’ve collected our best stuff from the past week for your weekend reading pleasure.

What we’re reading:

Our roles and responsibilities change quickly. So why do we order thousands of business cards with a title inked on each one? Introducing a solution: the fill-in-the-blank business card.

Sometimes the best way to complete a project is to stop doing it.

Thing that’s awesome: career advice. Thing that’s super awesome: career advice in graph form.

Want music to work to that keeps you going but isn’t distracting? Video game soundtracks were made for this.

Doesn’t matter if you’re a morning person or a night owl, you’re at your mental best between 9 a.m. and noon.

From 99u.com:

Garrett Camp founded StumbleUpon, Uber, and now he’s working on his next big thing. So how did he hit two home runs, and what’s his advice for budding entrepreneurs? Well, that’s just what we asked him.

Didn’t make it to the 99U Conference? Today’s your lucky day. Continuing our recap series with insights from Jason Fried, Swissmiss, and more, we present Recap 4: Entrepreneurship + Recap 5: Design.

And a special bonus: speaker Shantanu Starick doesn’t accept money for work. Instead he barters. And in exchange for speaking at the conference he agreed to photograph his journey from Turkey to New York. This is what happened.

—

Catch more links like these by signing up for our weekly newsletter below, which features our best content, delivered fresh every Sunday.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love discusses how both fear and success can drive us away from creativity in her talk Success, Failure and the Drive to Keep Creating. Both extremes bring us to a place of paralyze where we are afraid that we will either never succeed or that we will never live up to our past success. In both cases, the remedy is to find your way back to your creative home. Gilbert explains:

For me, going home meant returning to the work of writing because writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself.

Finding your creative home is identifying your passion and pursuing it wholeheartedly. When you are grounded in the work that you love, it doesn’t matter if it results in great success or great failure. Gilbert says that if you ever find yourself lost, follow your way back home by “putting your head down and performing with diligence and devotion and respect and reverence whatever the task is that love is calling forth from you next.” Watch the talk here: 

Morning with Farmer and Pitchfork; His Wife Riding a Donkey and Carrying a Basket. By: Vincent van Gogh

On Think Jar Collective, creativity author Michael Michalko examines the work ethic of artist Vincent van Gogh. He persistently labored on his craft every single day; creating over 2000 sketches and paintings within a decade. He understood that improving your skills through hard work furthered your ability more than having talent and not employing it. Here are the key lessons Michalko learned from van Gogh:

1. Get started: Don’t wait for everything to be perfect. “Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile,” said van Gogh.
2. Do the work: Commit to your goals and go through the motions to achieve it – whether the outcome is good or bad. Vincent van Gogh believed if you do nothing, you are nothing.
3. Work for yourself: The longer you work and figure things out for yourself, the more active your brain becomes. An active brain is a more creative brain.  

Vincent van Gogh did not resolve to become an artist until his late twenties. His cousin, a successful artist, even suggested van Gogh choose a different profession because he possessed no natural talent. It was through sheer work and perseverance that he became the artist that we know him as today. 

Question Designed by Rémy Médard for the Noun Project

Renowned American architect and engineer George Keller once said, “To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.” But as creatives, we sometimes trade creativity for speed only to meet deadlines with work that we aren’t proud to put into our portfolios.

In an old blog post, co-founder of Basecamp (and co-author of Rework) Jason Fried, compiled a list of every question he asked when looking at a design-in-progress. Some of the examples: 

• What does it say?
• What does it mean?
• Is what it says and what it means the same thing?
• Do we want that?
• Why do we need to say that here?
• Where’s the idea?
• What problem is that solving?
• How does this change someone’s mind?
• What makes this a must have?

Most of the time “is it done?” isn’t a good enough question.  If you plan ahead and build opportunities for structured feedback into your design process, you’ll be able to ask some of the aforementioned questions that will dramatically improve the quality of your work. It’s simple – if you ask better questions, you’ll get better answers.

Beyond the context of a design-in-progress, learn how to ask better questions from this Harvard Business Review primer here.  

Stairs designed by André Fauri from the Noun Project

We often don’t realize that we’re suffering from burnout until it’s too late. Here at 99u, we write a lot about burnout, a serious subject concerning many creative professionals. Recently, we discussed the 3 Kinds of Burnout as well as 11 Ways to Avoid Burnout. We also explored How Overachievers Stay Sane and briefly touched on How to Spot Burnout (and Recover).

The burnout process has been divided into 12 phases by psychologists Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North. In a Scientific American Mind article, the stages are outlined as such:

1. The Compulsion to Prove Oneself; demonstrating worth obsessively; tends to hit the best employees, those with enthusiasm who accept responsibility readily.
2. Working Harder; an inability to switch off.
3. Neglecting Their Needs; erratic sleeping, eating disrupted, lack of social interaction.
4. Displacement of Conflicts; problems are dismissed, we may feel threatened, panicky and jittery.
5. Revision of Values; values are skewed, friends and family dismissed, hobbies seen as irrelevant, work is only focus.
6. Denial of Emerging Problems; intolerance, perceiving collaborators as stupid, lazy, demanding, or undisciplined, social contacts harder; cynicism, aggression; problems are viewed as caused by time pressure and work, not because of life changes.
7. Withdrawal; social life small or non-existent, need to feel relief from stress, alcohol/drugs.
8. Odd Behavioural Changes; changes in behaviour obvious, friends and family concerned.
9. Depersonalization; seeing neither self nor others as valuable, and no longer perceive own needs.
10. Inner Emptiness; feeling empty inside and to overcome this, look for activity such as overeating, sex, alcohol, or drugs; activities are often exaggerated.
11. Depression; feeling lost and unsure, exhausted, future feels bleak and dark.
12. Burnout Syndrome; can include total mental and physical collapse; time for full medical attention.

When we push our creativity and productivity to its limits, we can easily find ourselves teetering on brink of burnout. And there’s a fine line between being in the zone and falling down the slippery slope of mental, emotional and physical exhaustion. Therefore it’s worth occasionally referring back to this list to self-diagnose.

If you find yourself burned out, Andew Ayres-Deets, a writer at Crew, wrote insightful and practical blog post on how to bounce back after burning out that’s worth a read.

In this video, philosopher and author Roman Krznaric speaks about the importance of “outrospection“ as a key component of cultivating empathy by thinking outside yourself, and developing a new ways to engage with the world.

How you identify with different people actually colors your engagement and method of interaction. Next time you are thinking about a big problem, use outrospection to reframe the issue you’re facing. And be sure to check out more big ideas and content from RSA speakers and lectures here.