Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.
Follow to get new release updates and improved recommendations
About C. Louis S.
Are you an author?
Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography.
Author Updates
-
-
Blog postimage by 1ktruefans.com
I listened to this podcast by Kevin Kaiser and Robert Liparulo and it was great. The podcast wasn't meant to be about creativity, but they talked a lot about creativity. It was great.
They talked about how alpha waves are what your brain makes right before you have a good idea.
They talked about the decline of creativity because children watch too much media (visual media) and how school is focused too much on quantifiable -
Blog postI just wanted to give an update about how our daily stand up meetings are going. If you don't remember this experiment my family and I are doing, you can read about our daily accountability here.
The jury is still out on this experiment. My kids really love the meeting. When I asked them if they wanted to keep doing them, the answer was a resounding yes. But there reasons for liking the meetings was something along the lines of "we like to talk about what we're doing" and -
Blog postYou've likely experienced anxiety and stress while trying to be creative. Anxiety is our natural fear response. You've heard of our flight or fight reaction. Flight is our instinct to avoidance, escape, and even procrastination. Fight is directly tackling a problem and anguishing over the problem until we find a direct solution. Psychologists also say we have a third fear response: freezing which is playing dead, ignoring the problem, denial. All three of our natural responses are sometimes appr
-
-
Blog postimage by biography.com
I read this post by James Clear about Martha Graham and I just have to share.
Here's the quote that I absolutely loved from Martha Graham:“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your -
Blog postimage by tf2wh.com
This week at work I've been thinking a lot about how to determine if someone is a good engineer and how do you put someone at a certain level of ability. Next week I have to give training about this, so I really want to have something valuable to say.
The way that many companies interview software engineers includes whiteboard problems. You're in a room with the person interviewing you and he or she asks you to write some code on the whiteboard to sol -
Blog postimage by latimes.com
Harold Shapero was an American composer born in the 1920s and whose hero was Beethoven. I read some of his writing in this book that I'm reading and it just blew me away.
Here's some of the most important things I got out of the 3 pages I read of his writing (just 3 pages and yes all this).
Practice the building blocks
He talks about breaking a musical piece down into its phrases and practicing creating and rearranging phrases ove -
Blog postToday I'm going to mix in my moral compass a little bit with my ideas of creativity. I'm Christian and I believe that God created our world.
I want to talk about that. That act of creating the whole universe.
Imagine the sheer size of creating the universe. There are billions of galaxies. Each galaxy is billions of stars. Each star is many times larger than Earth. Earth is many times larger than me. Therefore, the universe is much much much larger than me.
-
Blog postHey, my name is Mitchell Ellis. I am Freelance Illustrator currently, but I have done work for start up businesses and even animation companies like Bento Box Entertainment. Most importantly, I have done work with Cameron for his stories (I Illustrated his book cover). Cameron inquired me about my own insights on creativity and being creative. So here is my attempt at unlocking the ever elusive concept of creativity!
How do I come up with new ideas?
I don’t think I really c -
Blog postimage by thegospelcoalition.org
I'm not very good at writing humor. In this next book I'm writing, I'm trying to have some humor, because let's face it Son of Shadow Hero of Light has none.
Looking back on how I wrote Son of Shadow Hero of Light, I realize that during my editing, I took out many things that initially I thought would be funny. We'll never know if they were actually funny, but I'm going to analyze why I took them out and learn something humor and rel -
Blog postimage by writeaboutdragons.com
Scott Ashton runs a writing blog at writeaboutdragons.com where he also makes available a YouTube writing course from filming NYT bestselling author Brandon Sanderson.
It's true. You're not as good a writer as you think you are. Most writers figure this out sooner or later and what’s interesting is that you’ll often hear the very best writers at the top of their game express as much. Some examples:“I aspire to someday write a book ha -
Blog postI really love TED talks. Here's another really great one from Liz Wiseman about why we should never grow up.
Walt Disney said:"Too many people grow up. That's the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget. They don't remember what it's like to be twelve years old."Some great quotes:
"I just slowed down and played."
"How does what we know, get in the way of what we don't know."
"Once we know [a -
Blog postThis week my family started doing daily standup meetings. It's a meeting we do everyday at work that lasts for 15 minutes where we all stand up and go around the circle saying what we did the day before and what we'll do today.
We're just trying it as an experiment in the family. We're going to try to find a time every day where I can take 15 minutes from work and do a video chat with them. I think it'll be great to connect with my wife and kids before I get home every day.
< -
Blog postI read some advice by Zach Holman in this AMA type github post and later on his blog about keeping a journal. The journaling idea was nothing new. But there were two things that stood out to me.
Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living"
If you don't examine your life and try to improve it, it's not even worth living. That's pretty cut and dry and a little scary. Makes me want to evaluate my life …
Talk through decisions with yourself -
Blog postimage by northernheckler.wordpress.com
So last week was a bad week at work. I had some long, stressful days most of the week because we were putting out a big fire.
We got it done in time and our team looked awesome, but I didn't get any writing done at home pretty much the whole week. I couldn't write here on the blog the whole week either. What's worse is that this week I still don't feel like being creative, nor can I come up with any ideas for blog posts. (And that' -
Blog postI just got a new manager this week at work. Nine years ago he had an accident that changed his life and landed him in wheelchair. He told us a little about how it changed his life and the most profound things are how it impacted his attitude.
He said he had to consciously choose to be happy.
He had to choose how he was going to live his life. They had to move to a house that was wheelchair accessible and I'm sure there were so many other things they had to change.
-
Blog postimage by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roger_Sessions.jpgToday's book appreciation post comes from Roger Sessions. He was an American composer and music teacher born in the 1890s. His work was considered neoclassical. He won a Pulitzer Price in 1974.
His few pages in this book that I'm slowly reading are about inspiration and how that translates to finished work of musical art.Inspiration is the impulse which sets creation in movement"'Inspiration' can come as a flash -
Blog postimage by asalesguy.com
Saying 'no' is so liberating!
I just had a off-site meeting yesterday where we had to prioritize and plan projects. There's been a lot of pressure on my team to do more than we are able to do. We're a small team and it's not possible to do everything that different departments were hoping we would do.
In the last few weeks and especially yesterday I got to tell people that we are not going to be doing some of those things. It felt so good. S -
Blog postI'm a month and a half into my new process and I've learned some things. I finished the storyboarding phase and now I'm writing the first draft! It took 1.5 months which I feel like is a big win because the first draft last book took 4 months and I still didn't have the story nailed down until at least the second draft, maybe later.
StoryboardingThe first thing I learned was that storyboarding was a success … but not really for the reasons I expected. You can read about my goals for the pr -
Blog postIt's been a while since i've done a book appreciation post. I think when I first started this blog in November I did one, but I haven't since then. Of course, you could count the whole months of January and February as a book appreciation post about Creativity Inc.
Today I'm going back to the book The Creative Process edited by Brewster Ghiselin from the direct words of some of our worlds greatest creative geniuses.
Mozart explained his creative process and it's quite f -
Blog postI've been on a TED talk kick lately. There are so many good ones and not enough time to watch them all. I watched one recently on managing creative people. I watched it to level-up my managing skills at work because I'm a team lead, but it just had so many good things, I needed to share here.
Normally this blog focuses more on individual creativity, so it might not help you out that much unless you manage creative people (aren't we all, though?). But it does talk about how a group c -
Blog postKen Robinson gave a great TED talk about how schools kill creativity.
I don't think I can add much to this incredible speech, but here's some great quotes:
"Creativity is as important as literacy and we should treat it as such."
"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."
"The whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors … but we shoul -
Blog post"Walt disney portrait" by NASA - http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2000-000060.html. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons."Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious … and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." – Walt DisneyI love this quote. I first heard it from the Disney movie Meet the Robinsons. I still cry every time I watch that movie, but a
-
Blog postimage by sueatkins1.wordpress.com
My kids came up with this game that they call their "connected game." It's the coolest thing ever and I totally wish I did that as a kid.
They both like different things. My daughter wants to play house and "family" and princesses but my son wants to pretend he's a transformer, or a power ranger, or a dump truck, or Spider-man. It's really cute to watch them play this game, because one will be almost totally obl -
Blog postThe question of whether you are creative is self-defeating. Being creative is more than just a black and white, boolean trait. You’d think that given the nature of the term that people would be more generous to apply all sorts of shades and hues of color to the spectrum rather than such cold extremes. But yes, as it is with pretty much anything else in the world, we all have some creativity in us, perhaps some more than others but that quickly becomes irrelevant when all is said and
-
Blog postimage by tammersaleh.com
I’m still stuck on this idea of test-driven writing. I had a follow-up idea to that which might make test-driven writing useful.
And that idea is test-driven reviewing. Have you ever reviewed someone’s work and you’re not quite sure what to say when you give it back to them? Usually the feedback is something like this:
“It was good."
“I liked it."
“That one part was pretty funny."
There’s obviously some probl
Titles By C. Louis S.
