by Oto | Mar 5, 2025 | Creativity, Design, Inspiration, Personal Development
I have always wanted to lead a creative life. The idea of spending most of my time immersed in the art, act and process of making sounds like the most appealing life to me.
Not fame or incredible wealth, but creativity.
I always thought that if I was able to sort out everything I needed to, and had enough to live off without thinking of money, I would spend all my time exploring and making stuff. That’s what I’ve always thought.
But actually making the time to do that, is a challenge.
One thing that stuck with me in my earlier years studying architecture, was the sense of a dedication to the aesthetic. And when I say that, I don’t just mean the surface look of things, I mean the philosophy and essence of thinking and making, of moulding artefacts and spaces. In this time, I was exposed to so many interesting things, and concepts. Many of which went over my head at the time, but few definitely struck a chord.
In my autodidactic journey since, I have carried that sense with me.
One thing I loved about the experience was the time in studio. We had this big open plan space where we all worked and made our models and worked on our designs. There was a compelling energy about the whole thing. And as I have delved into the lives and inspirations of artists and creators over time, I have enjoyed catching glimpses into their studios, spaces and processes.
I have always wanted a studio of my own.
It is why I call my company a studio, and not an agency.
For me the studio is a place of learning, experimenting and creating, and I think that is a beautiful thing. Creativity that is not just at the service of commerce, but a tool, a practice for being, for discovery, for evolving, for making oneself.
In trying to bring that to life, I have always had to balance this deep desire against economic realities. Most of my time and energy was held up in hustling and making money. And sure, the thing I do, my career is a creative one, so yes, I create all the time and I have grown and learned from that.
But it is my belief that creativity should exist unshackled by commerce, powered by pure soul. Which is why I have always written here, since 2010. Whether there was one person reading or a hundred.
And even when people advised me to monetise this in different ways, I always pushed back, feeling it would dilute the spirit of it. Imagine throwing ads all over this site to get ad money. Or tailoring my content to meet some algorithm instead of writing from my soul. What sin!
So today…some 14 years later, I feel ready to embrace cultivating a creative lifestyle on a deeper level. Sure, I do still need to work and spin my gears in the machine of commerce. But I am able to balance things a bit better. I want to focus on carving and cultivating a creative life.
I am a good creative. I am also a lazy one. I take a lot of shortcuts. And in the fast paced world of design and business, speed is prioritised over craft many times. I hardly have the space and time to really craft something special. In embracing a creative life and devoting time to it, I am hoping to study, to get better, to improve, to pick up new skills, to be able to do more. To learn myself, to create myself, to connect with others like me. To create cool things for you.
That is one of my personal themes for the year.
So, how does that work?
For me, it means creating all the time, in any medium.
They say you should niche down, find one thing and get really good at it.
I’m not doing that.
Personally, I want to try everything. I want to draw, and paint, write, take photos, shoot videos, design a space, design a building. I want to cook, d-jay, edit, design posters. I want to make books, and pulpy magazines. I want to work on a movie, help design a set, create in 3D and play with animation. I just want to make cool things.
When I think about cultivating a creative life, a few ideas come to mind.
Reclaim lost time
The first major challenge in living a more creative life is allocating the time to it. Making time from all the other things that demand my attention, and choosing to invest it instead in making, studying, and experimenting. What lost time can I reclaim for this purpose? What can I let go off to free up the space to create more?
Instead of scrolling, I could paint. Instead of obsessing over some client project, I could write. I could make quick sketches during my breaks. The point is learning to tuck away pockets of creativity into the mundane.
Always seek inspiration
To approach day to day life in a deeper way, to pay more attention. To not merely see things, but to really look at them, to study them, to sketch them, to research about them. To look at the mundane around you and discover the magic.
Make it easy to create all the time
I want to always be creating, with whatever time or resources I may have on hand. In compressed times, to make sketches, take notes, make snippets, make prototypes. And when able to dedicate more time, to go deeper and develop those into full works. To have the tools and set spaces available to begin creating at any time.
Watch and absorb the greats
It is important to look at what others have done. To be inspired and see ways, techniques and ideas that we can adopt into our own processes and style.
Embrace process
To be systematic in the ways that call for it, so I can be messy in execution. Being able to spread out the creative process, and do different bits at different times. To have systems, tools and processes, to capture ideas and bring them up when needed.
Embrace the discipline of practice
It does take some effort, to sit down and create, or study, or experiment, especially when you are not used to doing so regularly. But that is the point of cultivating a creative life, is to get more disciplined, to invest more time in slowing down, and engaging deeply, with art, with life.
This is my present intention, to lead a more creative life, to cultivate more of that energy, and these ideas may or may not survive contact with reality, but being creative is about sailing into the unknown and evolving into new modes of being and birthing new things.
Are you trying to cultivate more creativity in your life? What obstacles are you facing and what ideas can you share?
by Oto | Jan 9, 2025 | Inspiration, Musings, Personal Development
How to Achieve Anything You Want in 2025.
It is the start of a fresh new year and if you are like me, you are probably eager to get things started. You have the goals you want to tackle, obstacles to face and problems to solve.
It is a new year full of promise and potential.
And it could be your best year yet
…if you locked in.
What does it mean to lock in?
It means being tapped in, being connected, being committed. It means choosing a course of action and being completely committed to it.
And right there is our first condition for locking in – knowing what you want, what you are locking in for.
If you have been finding it hard to lock in, to really focus and put all your energy towards something, it could be just because you haven’t found or decided on something you truly and really want.
But if you already have that thing in mind, then you are in the right place. Even more so if you have tried multiple times and failed. You started that diet and exercise regime this time last year, and by February, they were long forgotten. You stated all those plans for your career and business, and by the time you got to December, you found yourself miles away from your intention, mired and busy with the agendas of others.
I know this well…because that has been me many times.
The good news about trying and failing to make things fit is that you are trying, trying to make something work, and that can be frustrating, but if you keep at it long enough, eventually something clicks…and then you lock in.
systems. kaizen. environment. seasons.
systems
The thing about making real and lasting change is that it has to be sustainable. Your tactics have to simple enough to manage over time.
And your biggest levers, the things you need to pay attention to are your systems and environment. Everything, every goal has to break down into its systems
The art of chasing a goal in a way that helps you not burnout is to take a lifestyle approach to it. Instead of just focusing on the goal and trying our best to follow the needed actions with willpower, we do something different.
We ask ourselves what we need to do consistently to reach that goal. Then we incorporate those actions into our regular lives and over time shift into the kind of person that naturally achieves their goals.
If for instance, we wanted to be healthier and fitter, we know what we have to do is eat better, exercise more and rest properly. We would probably need to stop ordering so much takeout and cook more. We would need to make the time to workout and move our bodies. We would need to respect our down time and make sure we get proper sleep.
Depending on who you are and what your life is, your answers to these issues would be different. And they probably are not very easy fixes. You might not even be able to do the thing you need to do yet.
You might need to cook, but maybe you don’t even know how to cook or what to cook. You might need to workout, but now you have to decide, do you go to the gym, or do you work out at home. Each component becomes a mini projects on its own.
But if we can keep with the process, not being so stringent on ourselves and prescribing what exact actions and roads we should take to our goal, then we can be creative and evolve ways of being that work for us.
kaizen
You need to think of these areas of your life as systems. Then you need to design and improve them to align to what they need to be. So sure, go ahead, take massive action.
Try to make the overhauls and effect the changes in your life with willpower, but as they fail, observe the points of failure and make corrections. As you fall back to your usual baseline of activity, look at ways to subtly improve and change small aspects of it.
Maybe instead of cooking every single day, you commit to just one meal a week. Thats tackling the issue from an action and habit point of view.
You could also get inspiration and flood your mind by watching cooking content, see how people make their meals and tackle managing their kitchens. Over time, you will change things. Maybe it starts with the things you buy for groceries, and as you get more comfortable with cooking, you are able to average 2-3 meals in some weeks.
And as you keep doing this, sooner or later you become a decent and regular cook and are on your way to being a more healthy person in a natural and more sustainable way.
That is the idea of this approach – to be natural and sustainable, to tackle issues from a root cause, to actually evolve and grow into this new person. It might take a while, but it is a stronger way to make that change and lock into your goal.
environment
The other massive lever in locking in, is your environment. A lot of how we operate and move as humans is on instinct, subconsciously. And your environment is the biggest influence on your choices and your actions.
The things around us can trigger a response before we even really think about it. Trying to quit sugar is much harder if you always have sweets hanging around. If you don’t make your environment an ally in your transformation, you will never change.
Do you want to give that project more time this year, then make a dedicated space for it in your apartment. Leave the tools lying around. The more you see them, the more you will be reminded of and inspired to take action.
You want to cook more? Make it easier to see and access your groceries and cooking gear. Invest in your kitchen and make it a pleasant place for you to make food.
You want to reduce friction, and reduce the steps you need to take to take the action you need to. You want good cues, triggers that will inspire you to do the right thing.
Remove distractions. Design your space and curate your environment to reflect the person you want to be.
seasons
So far I have discussed taking the easy and relaxed approach towards your goals. Slow changes in your habits and environment to help you evolve. I advocate that because it is easier than what we usually tend to do sometimes – go all out.
More often than not, you will always return to your baseline – your average performance, actions and habits. But now and again you do need to push past that and create a new baseline.
There are times you need to make a strong push. A full frontal assault on your dreams.Sometimes you do need to burn everything down and build it up again. Sometimes you need to put in a lot of effort and embrace difficult new practices and habits.
These seasons are important to push you over your present comfort zone and break you through to new experience and results. These are strong bursts and can’t be maintained for long, but they are important to do because the experience exposes us to new lifestyles and ways of being. With regular exposure, we can acclimatise to them.
After these strong bursts, As we tire and life gets in the way, we return down to a new baseline and focus on maintenance until we get to the next push season. From this new baseline, we can continue to move forward at a leisurely pace, as long as we keep moving and improving
Now what happens when you have been approaching multiple parts of your life with this sort of framework. Let’s say you have been messing around with content for a few years, having on and off seasons. Let’s say you have been refining and improving the business behind the scenes. Let’s say you have been maintaining a decent health baseline. Let’s say now you’ve got enough practice in all these different aspects of life, and now you have everything you need.
It opens up these seasons of time where the potential output of a lock-in season can be massive. Where all these different parts can coalesce to exponential growth and change.
That is the season I sense now, that with all of the small changes, all these improvements to the different systems that run my life, I can do some really interesting things.
For me, locking in means, doing what needs to be done, pushing each system as high performance as it could go and allowing them all work together to set a new baseline and to produce substantial results.
A whole year of locking in…that could be something spectacular.
by Oto | Oct 14, 2024 | Inspiration, Musings, Personal
Some weeks ago, I was listening to some YouTuber wax on some esoteric concept or the other, and he made an off handed comment on his way to making another more salient point…about how sometimes, we don’t get the things we seek because we want them too much.
That is the paradox of desire. The more desperate you are for a thing, the more you push it away. It is almost like the universe conspires to keep you in a state of desire, so you can never really have the thing you want.
But desire is important, wanting is important. It gives us something to energetically attract. So, it is almost like you have to want it, but not too much. Because wanting it too much, can keep you stuck in the beginning stages of the process, and keep you from taking the necessary steps to get what you want.
You start worrying about getting it perfect, about what others would think, hoping for the glory of already achieving it, instead of doing the work you need to do to get it.
Other times, we build up the thing we want in our minds. We make it a big deal, we put it on a pedestal, and imagine that there is a lot that we have to do, to get ourselves there. That this is some big mountain to climb. And sometimes, it might really be.
But this way of thinking, puts a lot of space between where we are now and the thing that we want. And this (imagined) chasm can be so wide, that we never take the proper steps to get what we want.
But if we collapse the space between, if we hold the things we want as important enough to take concrete steps towards or to seize opportunities as they arise, but not so big and scary that they freeze us in inaction, forever in a state of getting ready, then we will stand a chance of getting what we want, especially the things that have evaded us for so long.
If there is a long standing goal that you have been unable to accomplish, it is perhaps worth it to ask yourself, if you have put too much space between you and this thing. It is possible, that you have imagined this thing as being bigger than it really is. It is possible, that in your desire to get it perfect – because it is so big, you remain stuck doing nothing. It is possible, that in putting this thing on a pedestal, you have imagined this long and arduous journey to get there, whereas, there is a more direct and easier path just waiting to be discovered.
In collapsing the space between us and what we want, we are able to view things in a more objective light, and take the appropriate action, moving resolutely, but holding things loosely and adapting to the results as they come.
by Oto | Jul 18, 2024 | Creativity, Design, Inspiration, Musings, Personal Development
The concept of curation* has been on my mind for at least the past 2 years. Slowly coalescing over time as I have been fixated on the idea of defining and creating specific spaces and experiences around me.
This is a natural extension of the theme of ‘Life by Design’ – creating a life that is tailored to you, that affirms who you are, who you want to be, and what you seek to accomplish.
I have discussed the importance of your environment and why you must design your spaces in ways that support the pursuit of your goals and passions. But beyond just your environment, all things can be brought to align with your intention. The things you do, the clothes you wear, the people you interact with, the places you go. All of this can be curated around your identity.
Like I said, over the past few years, I have been engaging with this practice of curation. I have specifically selected and chosen the things around me. My space is a curation of objects and tools that are chosen and actively sought after to create the vibe I desire to live in. The people I spend time with are curated towards a similar purpose.
We all do this anyway. We all curate our lives in some way. The things we choose to watch, engage with, and use, are things that we are drawn to or exposed to. The question is, do we just allow these things into our lives haphazardly or do we consciously choose them? Because oftentimes, some of the things around us are not things we actively chose. Many times they were just always there, or they were handed to us by factors outside our control.
But being awake to life, to ourselves and our purpose, we have the ability to curate, to create around us the spaces, the people, the things, the practices, the rituals, the habits that serve that purpose, that help us grow, evolve, and be effective.
This is the philosophy of curation – bringing the practice of consciousness, of awareness, and deliberate choice to every part of our lives. To embrace the things we deem important, that give us life, fulfillment, pleasure, joy and curate around them, to invest in them, to share them. It is the path of intentionality – choosing and organising the tools, people, things and spaces that reinforce our values, desires and ambitions.
That is why we curate, as a discipline to life.
And what we choose to omit from our lives is just as important as what we choose to keep.
So what are some key things to keep in mind when curating our lives?
Know yourself, Observe yourself
Self-awareness is the starting point for all of this. It is impossible to curate if you don’t even know who you are. A sense of identity and purpose is absolutely vital. Know yourself, your strengths, weaknesses, interests, and know where you are trying to go, and what you are trying to do.
Take stock of what you have, of how things are right now. What can be improved? What needs to be adjusted, what habits do you need to drop, what rituals do you need to adopt? Look at areas where you can grow and take the necessary steps to implement them.
Curate all areas, Curate for Life
Have a holistic approach to curation and apply the principles across all areas of your life – your diet, your space, your habits, workflows, workspace, clothing, and leisure. Curate and improve every aspect of your life.
Don’t curate and optimise just for productivity and high performance, also curate for fun and pleasure, for relief, for rest and restoration. Curate your life in such a way that each part is balanced appropriately.
Seek Inspiration, Keep Evolving
It is okay to look at what others are doing. Look for inspiration and best practices, ideas that show you how great things can be in those areas of your life. They will help boost your interest and excitement and transform your life.
This is not a stagnant thing, to be done, set, and forgotten. It is a discipline, a philosophy, a way of life. To stay in tune with a sense of self, and to perpetually change and evolve the things around us in ways that stay true to who we are. As we evolve and grow over time, so we curate our lives to reflect that.
Embrace some level of chaos
We live in a world, we exist in community. Everyone has their own ideas of what is important and how lives should be. We have to exist in conversation with that. With the ideas and practice of curation, it is easy to design ourselves into isolated bubbles. But it is important to interact with things outside our curations, to have impact, to learn things we never would have, and to share our unique perspectives.
The power of curation is the ability to create the person you want to be. With it, you can significantly transform your life. It will help you hone your environment and routines in ways that will catalyse your growth and fulfilment. Add it to your toolbox, as you create a life by design.
…
Side Note
*In our present-day culture, we understand the concept of curation from the art world, the process of selecting and organising artworks into a cohesive show or exhibition. The etymology of the word is from the Latin word curare, meaning to take care. This idea of caring for something persisted from the Roman times when it meant to take care of the bathhouses. In medieval times, it denoted the priest who cared for souls, by the 18th century it had come to mean looking after artifacts and art collections.
[In a 2014 interview in the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/23/hans-ulrich-obrist-art-curator#:~:text=It’s worth thinking about the,care of the bath houses.)*, Hans Ulrich Obrist posits that as a profession, curation meant at least four things. To preserve and safeguard the heritage of art, to be a selector of new work, to connect to art history, and to display or arrange the work.*
If I were to extrapolate those 4 key pillars to the idea of curating for life, I would say it means – to preserve what already works, to seek new ideas and practices, to connect to a deep sense of self/identity, and to be organised and deliberate in how we live.
by Oto | Apr 29, 2024 | Inspiration, Musings, Personal Development, Productivity
By nature, building a Life by Design requires a perpetual sense of intentionality. Getting clear about what you want, where you are, what is standing in your way, and what action you can take. To process these questions, we will often resort to our tools of introspection – pondering, writing, journaling, all that good stuff.
Sometimes these are simple musings, or us jotting down our wildest dreams, the things we hope to achieve but have no real way of engaging with yet. Other times we are busy making concrete plans, lists, and checklists.
As we work out our lives, we piece together our dreams with scraps of information, knowledge, messages, and drafts of content. Each piece adds to the puzzle that is the pursuit of our goals.
Every day we come across a wide range of inputs. We dig into the ideas of others, the lessons from those who have gone the way before us. We dip into the daily rapids of social media, a stream teeming with entertainment, propaganda, tips, tricks, and showcases.
A lot of it is useless, sure. But there is also so much information that we stumble upon that is clearly useful to our lives, our goals, and our routines. If we are lucky, we capture them somewhere, maybe in the bookmarks folder of our favourite platform, or in our watch later tab on YouTube. Where they proceed to be lost to time, never to be seen again.
Eventually, managing all these bits of information grows unwieldy. We have our notes and ideas strewn across notepads, notebooks, sheets of paper, as well as the aforementioned plethora of apps and social media platforms. If we are particularly messy, perhaps even our actual digital desktop is a chaotic mess of files. I’ve been there.
More frustratingly so, when we need to get work done, be creative, and pursue a goal, taking action becomes hampered by the difficulty of remembering and finding that cool idea or resource you came across the other day.
There has to be a way, a framework to approach this problem of personal knowledge management.
What if there was a way to wrangle all these platforms and mediums, all this knowledge, ideas, thoughts, and intellectual property in a way that is streamlined, and effective?
Imagine having a way to handle every stray idea or inspiration that came to mind or that you stumbled across. Imagine being able to archive the information you gather and find it at a whim. Imagine sitting down to work and having all the research and notes you’ve gathered, processed, and available at your fingertips ready to be whipped up into your next magnum opus.
Imagine reading books and retaining more, and being able to quickly dive back into the contents of those books just by quickly browsing your notes.
Consider the mental bandwidth it would free for you, grasp the kind of gains you could make to the quality and quantity of your work and your life.
Enter “Building a Second Brain” a book by Tiago Forte.
I first heard about this book some years ago but never got around to reading it properly. At the time, what little I knew about the concept paired well with Ryan Holiday’s idea of the Commonplace Book. But I definitely appreciated the premise and core idea, the need to have a framework and method to manage the information you collect, consume, and create in a way that deepens your learning and supercharges your effectiveness at getting things done.
I have always used notebooks and A4 sheets of paper to understand myself and plan my life. I have also dabbled with almost every app and platform known to man. And while my process had certainly improved over time, In 2024, there was certainly much room for improvement.
So over the past few months, I finally got around to it and I’ve been reading and re-reading the book, and I highly recommend the book. If you would like to build a proper personal knowledge management system and become a ninja at using and manipulating information, this is a good place to start. Get and read the book.
If you already have some form of personal knowledge management system going on, this book could help you refine and improve that still.
In the meantime, here are some key ideas.
First, what the hell is even a Second Brain?
A Second Brain is a system of note-capturing apps and processing methods that allow you to effectively manage the information you come across, consume, and create.
With it, you can collate all the random ideas, notes to self, research, plans, checklists, dreams, creative projects, goals, all the bits of information that run your life and put them into a framework that allows you to easily capture things that resonate with you, process them and find them when you need to use it.
Essentially, your Second Brain is an external digital repository that handles the collection and storing of facts, ideas, and information, so that your actual brain, your First Brain is free and primed to do what it does best – think, imagine, and create.
This is especially important for the creative. A huge part of the creative process is collecting information, references, ideas, and inspiration. The way we collect these pieces of information and the ease with which we can manipulate, use, and reuse them will have massive impacts on our creative output and experience.
It is important for everyone, even if you don’t consider yourself creative.
“Anything you want to accomplish – executing a project at work, getting a new job, learning a new skill, starting a business – requires finding and putting to use the right information.“
Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain)
So, why build and maintain a Second Brain?
- It keeps you organised. We consume and create an enormous amount of information daily, we need a system to keep all of it in check, capturing what is truly important in an easily scannable, digestible, and implementable format. I have talked about the power of being organised many times. Bringing this philosophy into your knowledge management system is a superpower. When you are set up like this, you are able to work effectively, and even when you are thrown off course, or take breaks or time off from the project, you are easily able to pick up right where you left off because of how organised you are.
- It helps you look deeper at the world around you. Knowing that you have a system on hand, to easily capture and review information that is important to you, you begin to engage with the world more deeply. You deepen the texture of your life. You are no longer overwhelmed, but able to listen properly, take better notes, notice things you never saw before, and make connections you never noticed before. You can freely go down rabbit holes knowing you have a way to capture the things you learn.
- It helps you understand and retain more from the content you consume. With the Second Brain, you will have a way to capture the ideas you glean from videos, social media, books, random chats with friends, and so on. More so, you are able to actually engage with the ideas, put them in your own words, and apply them to your life.
- Curate your storehouse of ideas and epiphanies. All those crazy and powerful insights you get in your daily life. From that book, video, podcast, conversation. Now you have a place to put them and return to when you need them. Over time, you will build your personal library of wisdom, your own tao.
- Makes it easy for you to do the work that matters. In our fast-paced world, we are bombarded with information and requests all day. Having a Second Brain allows us to focus on what is truly important to us and handle the rest appropriately. In today’s age, the quality of work and opportunities we have are a direct function of the information we use and have. Building a Second Brain is a powerful tool in increasing our skills, and advancing our careers.
- Frees up the mind to do what it does best, be creative. Like I said earlier, the Second Brain does the work of remembering and organising all the information that you come across, so you can actually do the fun stuff – being innovative and creative, actually putting remarkable things out into the world.
“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Gustave Flaubert, French Novelist.
This might all seem overwhelming, but the key idea here is to take this concept and make it your own. Embed these ideas in your way into your daily routine and lifestyle. As you build your Second Brain, it will become second nature to capture the ideas that resonate with you, as well as review and process your notes, so as you work on your practice of work or creativity, as you build your Life by Design, you are able to be incredibly effective and do amazing things.
by Oto | Mar 11, 2024 | Inspiration, Musings, Personal Development, Productivity
As you walk down the path of intentional living, you will end up refining, curating and building a life tailored to your soul. Your routine, your habits, and your environment all working together to move you to the place you want to be and to a fuller expression of your potential – your most authentic self.
At this point, you know yourself, and what you are all about. You know the things that you like and what resonates with your soul. For the first time, you might actually have the opportunity to truly immerse yourself in these things. How do you go deeper?
This is something I have been thinking about lately – how to improve the texture of life.
These days, my life feels very intentional. For the first time in a decade, I feel truly ready to live the life I have always tried to create. I am doing good work, with good people. I have the relationships and space and everything I need to make things happen. And that is great. But what comes next? How can I improve the day-to-day experiential texture of my life? how do I deepen the results I get?
This idea of deepening the texture of life first occurred to me in the context of improving my creative process.
As a freelancer over the years, I always had the experience of going for quantity over quality. I would pack my schedule full of work to maximise the amount of money I could make. And because sometimes clients fall off, or payments are delayed and all sorts of things happen, the easiest way to deal with that instability is to pack on so much, that on average things work out.
The problem with doing things this way is that you end up rushing a lot. You move quickly from thing to thing, doing what is good enough, as opposed to what is best. And to an extent, it can work. I have become able to do a fair amount of high quality work in a compressed period of time.
However, I do want to improve the texture of my creative work. To make it richer in meaning, execution and impact. And that means more time, that means more experimentation. It requires an investment in learning, in studying, practicing new techniques, pushing software to its limits.
To deepen the texture of my work, I would need to set aside time for just that. Periods of time to be fully immersed. To sacrifice efficiency and instead linger longer, to wonder, ponder and create.
When you scale this concept up, deepening the texture of life means adding new layers to the things to do. To discover what you love and to invest the time and energy in knowing it deeper, to practicing it deeper, slower, more intentionally, to really flesh it out and grow in that dimension.
It means being mindful of your experience, and investing the time and resources to doing it well.
Deepening the texture of work means being more organised, tracking your progress, staying strategically aware, collaborating with people, and seeking more impact.
Deepening the texture of relationships, means more time spent with loved ones, deeper conversations and bonded activities.
Deepening the texture of rest means truly unplugging, setting boundaries, improving sleep, exercising the body, and engaging in hobbies for the simple pleasure of doing them.
It is really just about identifying that things you love and engaging in them in a deeper way to enrich the quality of your life experience and your output.
This is usually the opposite of what we generally do, which is hurtle from one thing to the next. In the bid to do more, we get busy, burdened with tasks and responsibilities. And so we rush from thing to thing, never truly paying attention. In turn, we live shallow lives, getting things done but nothing exceptionally great, nothing that activates and deepens the soul.
Deepening the texture of your life is highly focused curation. The energy you cultivate and entertain around your interests is very important. It is crucial to walk with people who share your passion. In this way the depth multiplies, everyone bringing something unique to the shared experience.
As you deepen your life in this way, you will experience new levels of joy and satisfaction and reap the benefits of a profoundly intentional life.
Enjoy it, grow from it and share it with those whose energies are attuned to yours. Walk with those who are passionate about the things you are, and unlock a new experience.
