Telling stories about time traveling and creativity

Latest episode of the podcast is out!

Another Excuse Newsletter

Welcome back to the Another Excuse Newsletter. It isn’t just another excuse, but a reason to start that thing you’ve been putting off.

What to expect this week:
👓Perspective — Time Travel
🔨 Tool — Figma
🍿Consume — The Creative Act
📖Concept — Storyworthy

Latest Podcast Episode

In today’s episode, I chatted with Jason Carpenter, founder of Etherbridge, a digital asset fund. He shared valuable insights on starting a business and resources to get started in Web3.

You can check out the episode here.

Perspective

Time Travel

If you could go back in time to give yourself advice, do you think younger you would listen?

Hind site is always 20/20 and sometimes we wish we could go back and do things differently with what we know now.

But that’s the current you talking.

I know I wouldn’t have listened. I was stubborn and had to make mistakes and choose a path for myself. I’ve gone about it in a roundabout way.

Advice can fall on deaf ears if you’re not ready to hear it. You have to want it and have the humility to know that you’re doing things wrong.

Knowing that my younger self wouldn’t have taken the advice on board helps me come to terms with where I am in life.

It helps me understand that this is my unique journey and I’m not going to gain anything through comparison.

You can learn a lot from others when you’re ready to learn. When you are, just ask and people would be happy to offer their advice.

Would younger you listen?

Tool

Figma

I can’t believe I haven’t spoken about this tool yet.

I use it every day and it’s one of my favourite tools.

I use it for any image I want to create that’s not a straight-up picture. I design all of my podcast thumbnails, all the art for this newsletter and any carousels or backgrounds.

It’s pretty intuitive and just like any tool out there, there’s an extensive library of tutorials to get you on your way.

Figma simplifies Adobe Illustrator into all the useful tools you need to get things done.

And it’s free!

Other capabilities I’m learning more about are web design and app UX development.

It has such a strong community that users create plugins to make your life even easier.

A crazy plugin is html.to.design. The way it works is you can copy the URL of any website and it will upload it into Figma with each part of the website being a separate component.

That means the text will be separate from the background and all of the picture and other elements too.

The plugin can work the other way too. You can design the whole website by dragging and sizing elements and when you’re done turn it into HTML on a website builder like Webflow.

Crazy right?

Go design your next website and send me the URL!

Consume (Read / Watch / Listen)

The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Rick Rubin is one of the most interesting men.

He has created a career based on feeling and intuition and his services are highly sought after.

Many amazing musicians have turned to Rick Rubin when they’re in a creative rut, or simply want to produce a piece of work that is better than anything they’ve ever created before.

He’s worked with the likes of Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, U2, Kanye West, Adele, Lady Gaga, Eminem and Ed Sheeran, to name a few.

He’s basically worked with everyone.

He created a book about his observations of the world. Simply sharing his thoughts.

The purpose of the book is to get you to reflect and look a little deeper than you previously may have.

What’s great is that each thought is about 2 pages long. The idea is to read a thought and think about it for a while.

You aren’t going to fly through it and you may read some thoughts over and over again.

It’s a great book to have on your bedside table and pick up when you start your day. It gets you really thinking and reflecting on how you observe your own life.

A great book written by a very intelligent man.

Concept

Storyworthy

Yes, another book, but rather than the whole thing, just a concept from it that really got me thinking.

The basic idea is that anyone’s life is Storyworthy and nothing interesting has to happen in your life for you to make a story out of it.

To come up with great stories to tell, all you have to be is more reflective than you have been before.

Dicks, the author, gets his students to record one storyworthy thing they did that day. He had been doing it for decades and the results show.

It’s not about doing interesting things every day, it’s about paying attention to your life and the little things that happen.

You’re not going to be great at picking out the storyworthy occurrences right from the start, but making it a daily practice flexes the muscle.

I find it interesting how this approach resembles journaling which is also beneficial to your mental health.

Simply taking note of your days, fills them with meaningful moments because you gave them meaning. They were always there.

The rest of the book goes on to help you structure the stories and how to deliver them.

But the message I got was, take time to reflect and appreciate what you’ve got.

The benefits of amazing.

Thanks for Reading

Now start something!

P.S. Feedback is welcome and needed! If you’d prefer to send me an email and not respond, you can do so here: byron@anotherexcuse.xyz