Make your art your obsession. Fall in love with it. Experience withdrawal symptoms when you don’t give it your attention.

via The Art of Non-Conformity » How to Write 300,000 Words In 1 Year.

J.D. breaks it down how he–a long time gamer–turned personal finance into a game. It’s kind of fascinating, really.

Think of your favorite games — especially video games. What makes them fun? What makes you want to play again? How can these elements be extracted from game design and used in real life? In this case, for promoting smart personal finance?

At first, I thought the idea sounded silly. But I quickly realized that I’ve subconsciously been using game design principles to help me cut spending, boost income, get out of debt, and build wealth. My own approach to money management has been game-based for the past seven years, but I haven’t realized it until now.

Playing to Win: Turning Money Management into a Game.

“This time is a really important time for you guys because nobody knows who you are, and nobody should. This is not a time to promote yourself. It doesn’t matter. This is the time to get your stuff together. Promotion can be like that. You can have promotion in 30 seconds if your stuff is good. Good music is its own promotion.”

This is really a fantastic article, one that anyone trying to perfect their craft should read.

via John Mayer 2011 Clinic – “Manage the Temptation to Publish Yourself” – Berklee Blogs.

The principle that I’d blown right past in my pursuit of creative invincibility was that each commitment I made, and each project I decided to take on, required something more of me than just my time. Each required my energy. And because I was not being strategic and purposeful about the number and nature of simultaneous commitments I was making, I soon found myself in energy debt. I was creatively inverted and no longer had enough energy to generate the ideas I needed just to keep my head above water.

When you are planning your life, you need to account for every commitment you make in every area.

The Fallacy of Compartmentalization.

Typically, they ask travelers to surrender their electronic devices upon check-in. In return, concierges provide them with old-fashioned diversions, from board games to literary classics.

via When Guests Check In, Their iPhones Check Out – WSJ.com.

Do you like surprises? If you do, it may surprise you to learn that a lot of other people don’t.

Our natural ability (or lack thereof) to deal with surprising situations and the uncertainty they generate may have an important role to play in our creativity.

via Creativity for the Cautious — PsyBlog.

The answer, surprisingly, is not that they have more will or discipline than you do. The counterintuitive secret to getting things done is to make them more automatic, so they require less energy.

It turns out we each have one reservoir of will and discipline, and it gets progressively depleted by any act of conscious self-regulation. In other words, if you spend energy trying toresist a fragrant chocolate chip cookie, you’ll have less energy left over to solve a difficult problem. Will and discipline decline inexorably as the day wears on.

The Only Way to Get Important Things Done – Tony Schwartz – Harvard Business Review.

LBJ, Napolean, JFK, Edison, Churchill… all mastered the skill of napping.

The Napping Habits of 8 Famous Men | The Art of Manliness.

Fantastic list by the 99Percent folk.

10 Awesome Videos On Idea Execution & The Creative Process :: Articles :: The 99 Percent.

I love this office.

Workspace of the Week: Creative corner office | Unclutterer.