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Want to get paid to create? If you start double dipping, you can do just that. What is double dipping?

In less than three weeks, over 200,000 people will allow themselves to go a little crazy for a month. They will gnash their teeth, smash their heads, and possibly destroy their livers. What can we learn from them?

Focus is as elusive as a ghost and slippery as a sturgeon, here one minute and gone the next. We all want to be focused on whatever we’re working on, but emails, cell phones, and the repo man all beg for our attention like neglected children.

This post details sixteen ways to increase focus, attention, and mindfulness.

Why do some people have all the good ideas? Are they born with a superior brain? Do they have a muse on a leash? Are they just darn lucky?

The answer is shockingly simple. Find out more…

When you start a project, what do you call it?
Imagine you’re just getting started with a new creative work. If it’s a book, do you say “this story I’m doing about guilt, fear, and cakes,’ or is it “The Ministry of Fear?” If a painting, do you say ‘this thing  with a bearded guy and a couple dead people’ or “The House of  Death“?
Which sounds less like an impotent attempt to describe a creative work?
Which seems more real?
No matter what kind of project you’re working on, giving it a concrete, …

The last post was fun to write, so without further ado about nothing, let’s continue the list. Here we go with 14 more ways to generate ideas, increase creativity, cure cancer, end all wars…you get the idea.
17. Travel Travel will give your brain a chance to go wild. New places, sights, smells, gravitational pulls, all these will give you a ton of new ideas. Remember, travel doesn’t mean going to the other side of the world. Try going to a nearby town, a place you’ve never or rarely been. Or …

Do you ever feel like someone replaced your brain with a cinder block?
Has your river of brainy brilliance turned to a sluice of stumped stupidity?
No matter what kind of work you do, sometimes you run into a wall; the ideas dry up and you feel anything but creative. It happens to everyone. Don’t worry. You’re not alone. You need a break. You need a strategy. You need a saga.
Here’s your saga, delivered in 16 steaming hot points. Use them, abuse them, but do tell me how they work for you.
1. …

Got an old trumpet or guitar collecting dust? Do you want to learn to play the piano all over again? Maybe  you used to play way back when. What happened? Did you put it away and forget about it? Did ‘life’ get in the way? If so, why?
Playing solo just for the sheer hell of it can be a challenge, and even more so if you’ve not played for a few years. However, the rewards of relearning an instrument are worth the time, effort, and pain.
Relearning an instrument is like …

When the wife and I moved to Korea, we left a lot behind behind: our family and friends, a big apartment, the comfort of the familiar, and the very icons of our Americanity: our cars.
We both drove late model gas sippers. We didn’t have a choice. In our town, like most other cities in the States, public transportation is a sad joke. Cities are sprawling messes of unplanned development. If sidewalks exist, they’re usually in terrible states of disrepair. In the country, if you don’t drive, you either rely on …