Practice failure; Alphabetic history; Chasing yourself

💡Think

Seeing as most of us on this newsletter are employed to be creative, we probably share a similar mindset that creativity and good ideas are locked well within our wheelhouse.

In my experience, the opposite is mostly true. And this extends beyond designers – the non-designers in here aren’t getting off that easy 😉

The drive for a monopolisation on output by all members of a business is what stifles creativity and forces cookie-cutter work to be produced.

For us to push innovation forward, it’s paramount that we become as cross-functional as possible when fleshing out our ideas for success.

So the task this week is to ask for feedback from someone outside of your immediate team. I bid you good luck.

📷 Look

Kew Bridge, London – From my Instagram

📖 Read

❶ Practice failure

I really like the sentiment of this one. In order for us to succeed, and navigate the rights and wrongs, it’s important for us to “practice failing”. It sounds like a weird one, but treating decision making and choices like a playbook will ensure we’re ready for (almost) whatever gets thrown at us.

Read this article

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❷ Who invented the alphabet?

Nice little history lesson for you all today. This article takes us through Europe, the Middle East, and Egypt to dig into the characters we throw away every second now. Hint: emojis have something to do with it.

Read this article

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❸ Stop chasing yourself

I’m probably not alone in picturing a future version of myself in which I’m a much better version of whatever I see in the mirror. The fact is that this is a fallacy. We aren’t that person, and it’s really unhealthy to be “chasing” or running after whatever it is that we think is who we should be; so how about we accept who we are and run with that?

Read this article

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Bonus round

• Ethan Hawke (the actor) on why we should give ourselves permission to be creative

• I officially went viral this week at the expense of designers. I’m not sorry

🎧 Listen

Google’s Eric Schmidt on innovation

This is a great one. The story Schmidt tells about how insubordination early on at Google from one of their employees led to huge breakthroughs in data is worth it alone. He goes on to discuss that innovation requires discomfort, and I think I’m on board.

Listen to this podcast (30 mins)

🙌 Share

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🙏 Thanks

Have a great week,
Luis Ouriach
@disco_lu