Do Interesting -- Notice. Collect. Share_ - Russell Davies

Interesting people are good at sharing. You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.

DO 1 Focus on something in the room you’re in. Just for a minute. Notice the patterns and the lack of patterns.

I use an app called 1 Second Everyday to take, well, a second of video every day. Dailyish. Most days since January 2015. The app makes it dead easy. I normally make them into monthly videos and bung them on my Vimeo account, where no one watches them. Occasionally, I’ll go back and look at an old one and be reminded of a holiday we went on or an old café I used to love. It forces you to keep an eye out for the visually interesting bits of your day. It dials up your attention. (Ironically, most days are pretty much like all the others, so you end up with street scenes and cups of coffee and lift doors closing. And eventually that’ll be the stuff the future finds fascinating. Whenever we watch a documentary featuring recovered footage from some famous historical event, the bits that stick out are the glimpses into everyday reality. Look at all the hats! Look at that street sign! How packed are the buses?!)

DO 2 Do something visual every day for 30 days.

DO 3 Get yourself a little notebook. Write in it dailyish for a week. Or take a photo.

I’ve chosen to write up the things I notice each week. And by keeping a digital note, I can open it on my phone, on the way to the office, or on my laptop, when I get to the office. That way, everything is kept in the order it happened. That’s just what works for me.

DO 4 Create a ‘noticings’ file on your phone. Put it on the Home screen.

Loads of people have started using voice notes instead. That works. Or do a little sketch. The key is to actively record something you’ve noticed. To consciously intervene so it doesn’t just pop like a soap bubble the minute your brain moves on.

A tiny creative act, repeated, gets powerful, quickly. Look at a tree. Take a photo. Could be a good photo. Might not be. It’s just a tree. Take a photo the next day. It’ll be different. Different light. Different weather. Different mood. Now you’re not just noticing the tree, you’re noticing the differences.

Do something once, it’s great. Do it twice, you add connections and time. Keep doing it and those effects multiply. And then, if you do something adjacent, you get a whole heap of benefits. You see the parallels, you get to compare and contrast. But, even more magically, if you’re also doing something else entirely, suddenly you’ll see that there are unexpected and unpredictable contrasts and comparisons. But, more importantly, you do something to yourself. As James says, it’s the doing that’s important, not the output. It’s where you put your attention.

DO 6 Pick somewhere you go regularly. Find something you see all the time. Take a picture every time you pass by. Start to notice the changes. Do it 12 times.

DO 7 Pick a favourite fictional character and try noticing the world through their eyes. Do it for an hour.

DO 8 Next time it rains, pop outside and notice how things sound different.

DO 9 What’s the best window with a view you can spend 10 minutes in front of this month? Have a gigantic cinema trip.

The other kind of stuff I notice is what we call nature. I’m very interested in tiny, small things around me. So oddly enough, I spend a lot of time looking down, especially when I’m walking. I’m trained as a documentary filmmaker and so I do a lot of quick photography on my phone. I’m always trying to go on walks and end up taking hundreds of photographs of extreme close-ups of moss and spiderwebs, and dewdrops and textures of rocks and colours of autumn leaves, and lots of different types of mushrooms and so on. I’m really interested in the beauty of very, very little and tiny things in nature and around us.

DO 10 Collect a visual note every day this week. Something without an explicit logical meaning, it just seems like you should shoot it.

Research is formalised curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. Zora Neale Hurston

If you want to cultivate ideas, you need to let them stew. Your stew will be tastier if you let your attention drift into other areas of study, adjacent worlds where there might be concepts that will help you.

There’s a magic in the accumulation of things, or of data.

Data collection is inherently creative. Depending on the data you choose to collect from the world, you can begin to see the world from a different perspective. Being a data collector means observing the world with curiosity.

DO 14 Count something. Every day for a month. Visualise it.

Focus on what stirs you up inside, what is beautiful and true. Ali Montag

Clearly, you should collect whatever you fancy. And some things are obvious: images, quotes, facts. But there are non-obvious things that will come in handy one day. Analogies, metaphors, ideas, models, assumptions, habits, patterns, vibes, objects that express ideas, images that evoke occasions, things you don’t understand yet but that you feel will mean something one day. Collect those too.

DO 15 If you’ve already got a scrapbook, go and have a leaf through. If you haven’t, maybe it’s time.

DO 18 Seek out influences and inspiration that are far away from what you’re working on.

The best ideas happen when you bang things together. It’s what makes a slow hunch work, it’s what a spark file’s for, it’s what makes a scrapbook or mood board useful. The juxtaposition of unexpected or unfamiliar elements. That’s what you should be practising here.

This urge to juxtapose is critical to getting all these creative elements into your work. Stick the things you’ve collected into your presentations. You’ll find that suddenly, somehow you’re making a bigger, better point. Throw the writers you love or the notes you’ve taken into the writing you do for your job. It’ll get more noticed and more effective.

In her ‘Science of Creativity’ newsletter, Annie Murphy Paul wrote about a study in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes which demonstrates: Task switching increases creativity. If you want to be creative, you should actually be switching tasks a lot more than you are already. Forcing people to switch frequently between two different tasks increased their creativity in two ways: It improved their ability to generate multiple ideas, heading in diverse directions; It improved their ability to identify the unique or best solution to the problem.

Next time you’re writing a presentation, try something—paste random images onto every slide, whatever’s on your desktop or on your phone. Just grab stuff. Then make the presentation work with those images. I bet it’ll get more interesting.

He says that you should ignore all the usual advice about writing for a general audience. You should just be incredibly specific, precise and excited about exactly what interests you (in all its variety and apparent randomness) because the way that search engines and the social dynamics of the internet work mean that if there’s anyone out there with similar interests, they will find you. They will be delighted to find another member of their tribe and they will start sending you stuff relating to whatever you’ve been blogging about. Trust me, this happens.

You are not wasting your time Even after 20 years of blogging, of it clearly being a productive, creative, extraordinarily fecund means of communication, you will get people sniffily telling you you’re wasting your time. ‘You must have a lot of time on your hands,’ they will tell you. It’s especially likely to come from gate-keepers in traditional creative industries. They don’t like the fact that we no longer need them. Don’t let this put you off. You’re unlikely to spend more time on blogging than you would on any other hobby or form of professional development. And it’ll be much more fun and rewarding.

DO 24 Start a list. Capture a thing a week for 10 weeks. Write a blog post about them all.

People who just talk about themselves tend to be boring. People who let slip something about themselves while talking about something that excites them are invariably fascinating. A similar thing goes for blogging. A great way to start is to share something small but personal. A hobby, something local. Or something from your family history.

If ‘do blogging’ is too big and vague as an instruction, here’s a way to dip your toe in. Do weeknotes. They’re a good way to nudge yourself into paying attention—not just to the big things, but little things too.

Unlike a daily diary, weeknotes are normally written on a Friday or a Sunday. They’re a review of the week: some noting down of events, some reflection, some gratitude. Whether you’ve learned something big or noticed something small, a weeknote is a good place to put it. As little or as much as you like, in paragraphs or bullet points.

It’s easy to convince yourself you don’t have the right conditions to do your project. But you almost certainly have the right conditions to do something. And that thing might well be better. As the patch says, constraints make you interesting.

DO 29 Pick a project you’ve always meant to do—or you’re right in the middle of—but which you find too daunting. Put enormous constraints around it. Like only giving yourself 20 minutes. Do it now.

The software engineer Alice Bartlett is a genius with frames. Her daughter once wanted to replicate an art show she’d seen. Alice elevated her daughter’s work beyond the stuff that only a parent could love by thinking about the framing. She used square paper so lots of pictures could be stuck on the wall in an appealing grid. And she made mini artist bios and even red dots to make it look more real.

If you’re nervous about events, it’s often because of their unpredictability. Will you know someone there? When’s a good time to arrive? Will I be expected to do something? The best way out of this is to organise your own. These problems disappear. Other problems arrive but we’ll solve them below.

Rules also make your event feel like ‘a thing’ and that is half the battle. If you give an event a name (even something as boring as Coffee Morning), make it regular and invent some rules, it will become ‘a thing’.

If you haven’t got a thing, you need an excuse. Most social occasions are just chats around an excuse. If you ask people to come over to your house and talk, they’ll think you’re strange. If you say it’s for a dinner party or poker or Grand Theft Auto, they’re perfectly happy.

DO 33 Start an event. It could just be you and a friend meeting for a cuppa. But if you make a badge ...

The best presentations don’t just tell people something—they tell them the same thing again and again but in different ways. They use analogies to help people understand.