Category: Art

The Japanese Art of Kintsugi: How to Practice Self-Improvement Without Judging Yourself Cover

The Japanese Art of Kintsugi: How to Practice Self-Improvement Without Judging Yourself

Nik

I still remember the commercials: “Clearasil Ultra Face Wash — and in three days, they’re gone!” “They” are the pimples, of course.

Each ad played out the same way: A teenage boy hides from his crush because he has acne. His friend reminds him of the party in three days. “You can’t go with that face!” The boy uses Clearasil, shows up, and gets to kiss the girl.

As someone who suffered three long years of intense acne in high school, those ads hit me right in the feels — first with hope, then with misery. After I tried the product and it didn’t work, Clearasil continued to erode my self-worth in 30-second increments by reaffirming a false belief I held about myself: As long as I have acne, girls won’t be interested in me, so there’s no point in even trying.

Every year, millions of teenagers share this experience, and it reveals a pattern deeply ingrained in Western culture: Find a flaw, worry about it, try a quick fix, and if it doesn’t work, go back to worrying. Repeat this cycle until some magic pill works or you find an even bigger inadequacy. While this may lead to some improvement, in the long run, it inevitably leads to self-loathing.

You wouldn’t think a pimple commercial reveals so much about a nation’s culture, but if you watch a few Japanese skincare ads for reference, you’ll see — because unlike Clearasil, they do clear things up.

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The Age of Unpaid Attention Cover

The Age of Unpaid Attention

Nik

In March, my girlfriend and I started an Unsplash account. We wanted a shared place to curate pictures of the food and travel we enjoyed together, and we thought: Why not do that in public? Maybe others will enjoy them as well.

It was never a commercial effort, but for kicks and giggles, we set up a $1 tip jar on PayPal. Unsplash has become a photography behemoth with some 20 billion views each month, and we too saw our stats rise quickly.

2,500 views in March, 16,000 in April, then 40,000, 60,000 — on and on, the zeroes kept piling up. This month, we racked up nearly 140,000 views, bringing our total to over 650,000 views in nine short months. We also got around 5,000 downloads. The only thing we didn’t get was a single $1 tip.

Screenshot via the author

This is just a small example with no stakes, but it highlights a worrying trend: We now live in an age of unpaid mass attention.

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Funny Shower Thoughts Cover

44 Funny Shower Thoughts That Will Snap Your Mind in Half

Nik

On any given day, your brain is either growing or deteriorating. There is no such thing as “maintaining” your mind.

When you don’t challenge your brain, that day, your mind will shrink a little. When you solve a problem or entertain a new idea, your mental ability will grow.

If you do the crossword every day, at first, it’ll make your brain sweat. Eventually, you’ll have memorized all the coded prompts, and it’ll only be a rote memory exercise. So how can you keep stretching your mind?

The answer is not to read a book a day or work crazy hours. Your brain would soon overload and demand a long break. Neither complete stagnation nor excessive learning is the answer.

What you can and should find time for, however, is five minutes a day to engage with new ideas. That’s enough to get new combinations of neurons to fire together, and that’s what mental growth is all about.

Ryan Lombard can help you do just that. Ryan has a series he calls “Thoughts That Will Snap Your Mind in Half.” So far, he’s made 20 parts. Here are the first eight, totaling 44 funny shower thoughts, ideas, and mind-bending questions.

Some made me think deeply, some just made me laugh, and some I didn’t understand at all (yet). I’m sure a few of them will send your mind in new directions.

Here are Ryan Lombard’s 44 “Thoughts That Will Snap Your Mind in Half.”

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The 3 Stages of Expert Simplicity Cover

The 3 Stages of Expert Simplicity

Nik

The more you advance in your career, the easier each working day should become.

Not easier in the sense that you won’t make hard decisions or accomplish big goals, but easygoing in the sense that each day is straightforward, calm, and devoid of pressure.

If your workday gets harder the more you achieve, you’re trading your expert status for the wrong rewards.

A partner at a big consulting company, for example, might work even longer hours than an associate. She may constantly fret about her partner status, the high stakes in each deal, and the ill-will among her peers. That’s not independence, that’s a shark tank: You get out or you get eaten. If she leaves, her pay and status will take a hit, but in the long run, she could build her own company: Equal earnings and prestige, much better working conditions.

Assuming you want such an outcome from the beginning — a life where your days are tranquil yet meaningful — you’ll have to go through three distinct stages, and you must not land in a shark tank as you go from beginner to expert. In an edition of his 3–2–1 newsletter, James Clear calls those phases “ignorant simplicity,” “functional complexity,” and “profound simplicity.”

What follows is my unique, personal definition of those phases. I feel they accurately reflect my own journey. I hope they’ll help you spot where you are and adjust accordingly.

Here are the three stages of expert simplicity for easier, more meaningful days at work.

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If You’ve Never Written Before, Don’t Charge for It Cover

If You’ve Never Written Before, Don’t Charge for It

Nik

Three weeks into studying abroad in the U.S., I started missing German bread. I love American food, but when it comes to “Brotzeit,” those pale, floppy slices of toast just don’t cut it.

I wanted a loaf. I wanted rye. I wanted the sour, moist-yet-crunchy freshness only German bread can provide. Unfortunately, it was impossible to find.

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say, and so eventually, I became desperate enough to decide to bake my own. Since my baking skills are on par with a nine-year-old, this was a much larger-scale effort than it might seem.

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Fragment It, Fuse It, Feel It Cover

Fragment It, Fuse It, Feel It

Nik

Practice makes perfect, right? So why is it that countless people practice certain skills for hours on end, but very few ever become world-class? What matters is how we practice.

In his book The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle discusses “deep practice,” a method used by world-class musicians, athletes, writers, and other masters of their craft. The idea is that the more new mistakes you can fix in a relatively short period of time, the faster you’ll make progress.

The trick, then, is to aggressively make and fix new mistakes instead of just repeating what you already know. Each time you fix a new mistake, new combinations of neurons fire in your brain, creating new mental pathways.

I’ve adapted Coyle’s research into a three-step practicing strategy: Fragment it, fuse it, feel it. You can use it to practice anything more deeply. Here’s how it works:

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If You’re an Intellectual, Act Like One Cover

If You’re an Intellectual, Act Like One

Nik

In seventh grade, my history teacher asked if anyone knew what the huge, fancy, painting-like carpets covering the walls of the Palace of Versailles were called. His question was met with silence and puzzled faces.

Eventually, I raised my hand and said: “Gobelin.” My teacher was thrilled. So was my neighbor. “Ooooh, go-be-liiiiin, Mr. I-know-everything.” The class erupted in laughter.

There’s something to be said here about shaming intellectuals and about a system in which being fun is cooler than being smart, but at 13 I was oblivious to both of those things — so I too erupted in laughter. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right?

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3 Ways To Handle Criticism as a Writer Cover

3 Ways To Handle Criticism as a Writer

Nik

Neil Gaiman once captured all you’ll ever need to know about criticism:

“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

Thankfully, most negative commenters on our art self-identify by telling us not just why our work sucks and what we should have done instead, but also that, by the way, we’re an idiot for taking the path we have chosen. In theory, it should be easy to ignore them.

In practice, however, the amateur gives far too much weight to any kind of feedback, especially the negative, mostly because thank god, finally, there is something to give weight to at all. After months of laboring in the dark, finally, someone descended from their throne of busyness to comment on our work. It must have been important to them — but it’s definitely important to us. This is a mistake, because 99% of criticism isn’t helpful at all.

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12 Habits of Deeply Inspiring People Cover

12 Habits of Deeply Inspiring People

Nik

What makes humans awe-inspiring? What makes someone magnetic, glowing, irresistible? Why do we hang on their every word, watch every single video, or read every one of their articles?

Every day, I ask myself these questions. I write inspiring stories — mainly because I need lots of inspiration.

Sometimes, the only way to be a hero is to ask for help from another hero. Most of the time, however, looking at them for inspiration will do.

When we see someone else showing courage, refusing to give up, or doing the right thing, it inspires us to do the same. We’ll go a little further, wait a little longer, and love a little harder when we feel that, somewhere out there, someone once made the same choice. This is the best thing we do.

Inspiration led to humanity’s biggest achievements, our grandest sacrifices, and our greatest acts of love. So what makes someone inspiring?

Here are 12 habits of deeply inspiring people.

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