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Wishful Thinking

inspiring creative professionals

Guest Articles for The 99% and MyCakeDecember 4 2009

I’ve recently written a couple of guest articles on other blogs that you might enjoy.

RSS Creativity – Routines, Systems, Spontaneity

A summary of my recent thinking about how to manage creative workflow without stifling your inspiration.

The 99% is an online magazine for creative professsionals – if you like Wishful Thinking you should feel very much at home. The 99% is produced by Behance, the company behind the Behance Network – a great place for creatives to network and showcase their work. (Here’s my Behance profile if you want to connect over there.)

Four Questions You Must Ask Before Starting Any Creative Project

Image by kaibara

A look at the different types of motivation – financial and otherwise –

The Lateral Action Creative Entrepreneur Course Is Now LiveNovember 22 2009

Image by Hugh MacLeod

UPDATE: We’ve now sold out. Thank you and welcome to all our charter members!

We’ll be running a second progamme early in 2010 – if you’d like to hear about it when we open up again, you can sign up on this page to join the e-mail notification list.

We’ve now started taking enrolments for the Lateral Action Creative Entrepreneur Course.

The course is designed for:

• Artists and creative freelancers
• People looking to set up a home-based business
• Bloggers looking to build a business around their blog

(If that doesn’t include you, you may want to skip this post — there are plenty more articles about creativity and related topics coming up on Wishful Thinking, plus the free e-book I’m working on …)

If you’d like to be one of our charter members, with lifetime access to the course (including all future updates) at a 50% discount, you can head over to Lateral Action and sign up.

The course gives y

Free Report: How to Become a Creative EntrepreneurNovember 18 2009

If you’re remotely interested in making a living from your creativity, I suggest you download a copy of the free report The Lateral Action Guide to Becoming a Creative Entrepreneur.

Written by Brian Clark, one of my partners at Lateral Action, it tells the story of Brian’s unconventional route to success, via Law, screenwriting, real estate (as they call it in the States) and blogging, to his current position as the founder of a multimillion-dollar online business enterprise.

What makes his story even more remarkable is the fact that he does it all with no venture capital funding, no employees, no office and very little overhead.

If you’re wondering how that’s possible, have a read through the report, where Brian explains his unconventional approach to entrepreneurship.

Crucially, he doesn’t just tell you what worked for him — he lays out the 5 Critical Components of Creative Entrepreneurship, that you can use to build your own creative enterprise:

• Create (Don’t C

Are You Ready for Sixth Sense Technology?November 16 2009

Photo by Broma

Imagine walking down the street and seeing a poster for a new film at your local cinema. It looks interesting, so you stop.

With a wave of your hand, you conjure an image of a web browser, projected onto the poster from a camera you’re wearing as an earpiece. You snap your fingers, and two gold stars appear, followed by three dark blue ones — indicating an average score of 2/5 from people who have seen the film. Scrolling down (with a thumb gesture) the top-rated review tells you all you need to know: great concept and stunning special effects, let down by a clumsy script and wooden performances.

Glad to have avoided a turkey, you continue down the street, until a flashing arrow projected onto a dustbin point you in the direction of a supermarket. You smile at the photo of your partner that flashes up afterwards — you’re used to receiving these little reminder notes on your way home.

As you approach the door, the words ‘kitchen roll’ appear on the glass in front of you. Glancing down at the floor, you follow the flashing arrows taking you to the correct aisle. You don’t recognise either brand of kitchen roll in stock, but picking up the first one, you see a red traffic light signal projected onto the surface of the product. Tapping it for further information, you read a short caption telling you about its high bleach content, and the company’s poor record on corporate social responsibility. (You have previously told the system that these are important criteria for your purchases.) You turn to the next product, and are pleased to see a green light flashing, meaning you can purchase it without hesitation.

You turn and walk out of the store without a second glance. As you approach the door, the price flashes on the glass, and is automatically debited from your account as you step out onto the street…

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Science fiction? For now, yes. But what would you say if I told you all the technology in this little scenario was already in development?

Have a look at this video demonstrating ’sixth sense technology’ (via Fresh Creation) — i.e. technology that extends our perception, by giving us access to information from computer networks.

Pretty impressive huh? Yes, it’s still a bit clunky, and no I’m not in a hurry to wear coloured symbols or paint my fingernails in primary colours. But imagine if you didn’t even need hand gestures to control this technology, but could do it by simply rolling your eyes…

… Look no further than Japan where, as this video demonstrates, eye gesture recognition is becoming a reality:

Maybe you’d rather talk to your computer than wink at it? In which case, it may interest you to know that I’m writing this article without touching the keyboard. For months now, as I wrote on Lateral Action, I’ve been doing most of my writing using speech recognition software.

But sometimes even talking can feel like too much effort. What would it be like if you could control your computer just by thinking about what you want it to do?

Well, as Apple would say, there’s an app for that too.

This next video may look slightly Open University in presentation style, but it tells an amazing story — of a message sent across the Internet between two computers, using the brainwaves of two human operators. The person receiving the message didn’t even have any conscious awareness of what it was!

Two New Wishful Thinkers!November 9 2009

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar

Firstly, sorry Wishful Thinking has been a bit quiet recently. I’ve got some new articles lined up shortly, and I’m working on a brand-new free e-book for you — watch this space.

Secondly, I don’t write much about my personal life on this blog, but I hope you will indulge me for a very special occasion.

Apart from my usual round of client work, writing for Lateral Action and writing and delivering the Creative Momentum workshops (which were a blast, thanks to everyone who came), I’ve had two new demands on my time – a twin boy and girl.

To have a son and daughter at the first time of asking might sound like wishful thinking — but if you take one thing from this blog, it’s that wishful thinking can lead to wonderful things. My wife and I are still pinching ourselves, and thanking our lucky stars.

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