How cultivating wonder can keep your creative energy flowing, and why it's so important to nurture it... This time last year I was able to travel to Scotland for a very happy reason — to party with my my parents on their 60th wedding anniversary. The journey didn’t exactly go smoothly, but travel always offers the opportunity to see things in a new light: for example our inexplicably cancelled connecting flight from London to Glasgow turned into an impromptu train journey up the west coast of...

...or: could you use a better inner coach, instead? Remember the Olympic games in Paris, when the media was flooding us with feel-good stories about quirky folks who had dedicated their life to pursuing excellence in one, extremely niche activity…and everyone thought it was cool? Good times. I was struck by the US Gymnastics team’s comments about how much happier they were, now that they had new coaches—coaches who motivated them with praise and love, rather than fear and shame. Oh, and they...

I always thought that an artist’s was the hardest life of all. Its rigor—not always apparent to an outside observer—is that an artist has to navigate forward into the unknown guided only by an internal sense of direction, keep up a set of standards which are imposed entirely from within, meanwhile maintaining faith that the task he has set himself to is worth struggling constantly to achieve. This is all contrary to the notion of bohemian disorder.” Lucian Freud (via Austin Kleon) If you’ve...