While no workplace is perfect, it turns out that our gravest challenges are a lot more primal and personal. It’s time to stop blaming our surroundings and start taking responsibility. In the foreword to the book, Behance founder Scott Belsky, author of the indispensable Making Ideas Happen, points to “reactionary workflow” - our tendency to respond to requests and other stimuli rather than create meaningful work - as today’s biggest problem and propounds a call to arms: (Though I prefer to paraphrase Edison to “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent aspiration” - since true aspiration produces effort that feels gratifying rather than merely grueling, enhancing the grit of perspiration with the gift of gratification.) Reflecting Thomas Edison’s oft-cited proclamation that “genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration,” after which 99U is named, the crucial importance of consistent application is a running theme. Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind ( public library), edited by Behance’s 99U editor-in-chief Jocelyn Glei and featuring contributions from a twenty of today’s most celebrated thinkers and doers, delves into the secrets of this holy grail of creativity. And though much of this is mere cultural voyeurism, there is something to be said for the value of a well-engineered daily routine to anchor the creative process. We seem to have a strange but all too human cultural fixation on the daily routines and daily rituals of famous creators, from Vonnegut to Burroughs to Darwin - as if a glimpse of their day-to-day would somehow magically infuse ours with equal potency, or replicating it would allow us to replicate their genius in turn.
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