Congratulations, after running on fumes for years—pulling all nighters, consuming Adderall and cramming for your exams—you’ve finally made it. You’ve finished school and earned your degree. But before you’ve even had a chance to catch your breath everyone’s asking, “So, what’s next?” To arm you in the coming struggle to pursue your post-graduate goals it may help to take a look at some proven practices from real life.
Congratulations, after running on fumes for years—pulling all nighters, consuming Adderall and cramming for your exams—you’ve finally made it. You’ve finished school and earned your degree. But before you’ve even had a chance to catch your breath everyone’s asking, “So, what’s next?”
To arm you in the coming struggle to pursue your post-graduate goals it may help to take a look at some proven practices from real life. These core practices come from over three-dozen superachievers who we interviewed for “The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It Well,” including actor Alec Baldwin, Zappos’s CEO Tony Hsieh, sports icon Yogi Berra, Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan, and Laura Linney. Continue reading “5 Tips for Graduates From Superachievers”
George Clinton has been in the business for 60 years, and is still going strong. The founder and shamanistic frontman of the seminal funk bands Parliament-Funkadelic and the P-Funk All Stars reflects on his long career and shares lessons he learned along the way.
He’s been in the business for 60 years and he’s still growing strong. The founder and shamanistic frontman of the seminal funk bands Parliament-Funkadelic and the P-Funk All Stars reflects on his long career, and shares lessons he’s learned along the way.
George Clinton was born in an outhouse in North Carolina in 1941.
At 13 he persuaded four friends to form a doo-wop band, the Parliaments. Years later Clinton moved the band to Detroit to try to get signed by Motown. But it was too late. The ’60s, with its cacophonous rock ’n’ roll, race riots and psychedelic drugs, had changed Clinton. “One day I put on a sheet and cut my hair in a Mohawk and walked around town,” he said. “I thought if nobody kicks my ass or arrests me, we’re gonna take this craziness to the stage.”
Within a couple of years, Clinton had become a grand funk provocateur. Under his management style of anarchistic humanitarianism, the musicians of his sprawling funk collective have flowed in and out of the bands that Clinton formed, splintered and merged, putting on outrageous shows and recording music that reflected America’s counterculture and black consciousness. Now in his 70s and still touring with the P-Funk All Stars, Clinton’s musical legacy that began in the era of doo-wop is a still a staple of the era of hip hop. Prince once said of Clinton, “They should give that man a government grant for being so funky.”
1. Someone has to be the ringleader. I was always pushing something. I was just a kid when I started our little doo-wop group, the Parliaments because we were all in love with Motown. I’d go into New York City, knocking on doors to try and make the deals. After we got our hit “(I wanna) Testify,” I moved the band out to Detroit because I wanted us to be the Temptations. Years later we had so many people coming and going on different labels with different acts, I got us our own studio and label. Sure it felt like responsibility, but the guys always left it for me to do all the business stuff. Someone’s got to be in control and if you know what you want, it might as well be you. Continue reading “The Mothership Connection: Funktastic Career Tips From Funk Legend George Clinton”
Join us June 18th at 7 PM for an Art of Doing talk, reading and book signing at the Harvard COOP.
We will be talking SUPERACHIEVERSand ways to think about success, reading from the book and signing copies at:
The COOP at Harvard Square on Tuesday June 18th at 7 PM.
Please join us!
Buy “The Art of Doing” here. Signup for “The Art of Doing” free weekly e-newsletter. Follow us on Twitter. Join “The Art of Doing” Facebook Community. If you’ve read “The Art of Doing” please take a moment to leave a review here.
What does self-awareness have to do with a restaurant empire? A tennis championship? Or a rock star’s dream?
Our story in the Sunday Review of The New York Times, January 2013
What does self-awareness have to do with a restaurant empire? A tennis championship? Or a rock star’s dream?
David Chang’s experience is instructive.
Mr. Chang is an internationally renowned, award-winning Korean-American chef, restaurateur and owner of the Momofuku restaurant group with eight restaurants from Toronto to Sydney, and other thriving enterprises, including bakeries and bars, a PBS TV show, guest spots on HBO’s “Treme” and a foodie magazine, Lucky Peach. He says he worked himself to the bone to realize his dream — to own a humble noodle bar.
He spent years cooking in some of New York City’s best restaurants, apprenticed in different noodle shops in Japan and then, finally, worked 18-hour days in his tiny restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar.
A Word Cloud based on our interview with Mark Frauenfelder, co-founder and co-editor of BoingBoing, the iconoclastic blog, for a chapter in our book on “How to Create One of the World’s Most Popular Blogs.”
Frequency is the currency of a word cloud. The more a word is repeated, the larger it appears in the cloud. Click here to see the interactive version.
This word cloud is based on our interview with Mark Frauenfelder, co-founder and co-editor of one of our favorite blogs (for a chapter in our book on “How to Create One of the World’s Most Popular Blogs). Frauenfelder’s iconoclastic BoingBoing (whose motto is Brain Candy for Happy Mutants) has been firing out a melange of digital innovation, DIY creations and wacked-out art for a decade and a half. (Already in blog years, several life cycles long.) What we see in Frauenfelder’s word cloud is his focus is not on market share, metrics or SEO, but on building a community of people by writing interesting and amazing posts rooted in real life that will connect with the reader.
How a New York Times reporter’s life went from perfect to imperfect and just right once she learned how to ride the wave.
Diane Cardwell New York Times Reporter surfing in Rockaway Beach. Photo by Josh Gosfield
For our blog we’ve wanted to write about some of the people we’ve come across who have changed their lives in profound or unexpected ways. Diane Cardwell is one of them.
If you had met Diane Cardwell just a few years ago, you would have thought her life was perfect with the prestigious job as a reporter at The New York Times, the handsome, ambitious, NGO-ish husband, the beautiful Brooklyn Brownstone they actually owned and land upstate to build their dream home someday. But when her marriage fell apart, Diane told us, her life no longer made sense to her. Continue reading “Reset: From Perfect to Imperfect”
Mankind has been gazing up at the stars for hundreds of thousands of years, wondering, “Are we alone?” Astronomer Jill Tarter, one of the world’s leading alien hunters, has put this quest at the center of her life.
The Art of Doing Artist’s Interpretation project is a collaboration between us and imaginative artists we’ve chosen to depict the superachievers in our book.
Since we think artist Michael Wertz’s work is brilliant, we asked him to create a piece of art about one of our superachievers. Because of Wertz’s love of all things extraterrestrial—from his childhood pillowcase covered in cosmic Peter Max imagery to the Carpenters’ ode to space, “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”—he jumped at the chance to depict astronomer Jill Tarter, one the world’s most prominent alien hunters. (Chapter 15 in our book on “How to Find Extraterrestrial Life.”)
The term alien hunter might conjure up images of Roswellian conspiracy theorists or UFOlogists, scanning the skies for sleek hovering spaceships and little green men, but astronomer Jill Tarter is far from that. Tarter is a TED prize-winning leader at the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) where a team of scientists at the Hat Creek Observatory in Northern California operates a powerful telescope array in the world’s most technologically advanced search for signs of life in the universe. Continue reading “Alien Hunter, Jill Tarter: An Artist’s Interpretation”
Presidential parenting, how the Obamas, particularly Michelle, set a conservative agenda.
Whatever you may think of Barack Obama’s politics, Michelle’s child-rearing style is decidedly conservative without a shred of the touchy-feely, go-with-the-flow stereotype of liberal parenting.
In a New York Timesstory last fall, Jodi Kantor, noted Obamologist, wrote that ‘Some staff members joke that they wish they could send their own children to Mrs. Obama’s boot camp for training.’
Ray Benson, frontman of Asleep At The Wheel, on living the dream: “If you can do anything else, than do that. But if you can’t be happy unless you’re a working musician performing every night than this is what you’ve got to do.”
Photo by Wyatt McSpaddin
Any one of us can fantasize about becoming the next X, Y or Z, whether it’s Steve Jobs, Justin Bieber or Julia Child. Well, of course, we all have dreams of spending our days engaged in what we’re passionate about. But how do you do it?
Writing our book, we had the chance to speak to dozens of extraordinary people who are doing just that—living their dreams. When we talked to Ray Benson, leader of the Austin-based, nine-time Grammy award winning Western Swing band, Asleep At The Wheel, about what it takes to keep the dream of playing music alive for over 40 years he told us: Continue reading “Western Swing Music Legend, Ray Benson on Living the Dream”
Dr. Robert Edwards spent decades trying to solve the riddle of infertility with IVF. His innovative approach was a lot like any you could find in a modern-day startup—underfunded, scrappy and improvised.
It was in the mid-1950s when Robert G. Edwards, a young post-grad student who worked menial jobs to pay for his tuition at the University of Edinburgh, got a crazy idea.
Working on a genetics project with mouse embryos at a university lab, Edwards wondered if he could “pluck the egg from the ovary [of a woman] and fertilize it in the laboratory,” he wrote in his book, A Matter of Life. More importantly, he thought, if he could transfer the resultant embryo back into the woman’s womb, he’d solve one of mankind’s most vexing biological problems–infertility.
Considering this leap from mouse to man, it was an audacious thought, and a highly unlikely goal for a young scientist-to-be. But nearly 25 years later, in 1978, Edwards’s dream came true when the first child was born through in vitro fertilization.
The history of every innovation is unique with its own idiosyncratic quirks, characters, and defining cultural moments. But when we look back on ideas that were mere visions before they were embraced by the public, such as IVF, it can be helpful to see how an innovator like Edwards (who died earlier this month) pulled it off. Here are some lessons any entrepreneur or visionary can borrow from Edwards’s quest: Continue reading “What the Creators of IVF Can Teach Us About Innovation”
Congratulations, after running on fumes for years—pulling all nighters, consuming Adderall and cramming for your exams—you’ve finally made it. You’ve finished school and earned your degree. But before you’ve even had a chance to catch your breath everyone’s asking, “So, what’s next?”
