Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses

Material resourcefulness

The Buddhist teacher Matthieu Ricard calls this dilemma “empathy fatigue.” In a study of doctors and nurses, Ricard and his collaborator Tania Singer, a neuroscientist and director of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, found that those who have empathy—who identify directly with their patients’ difficulties—get burned out. Those who have

You may be able to develop a model collaboratively that far outstrips what you can build on your own.

within the frameworks of operating a business. Those mindsets and tools come together to support the process of art, and all of the vulnerability, risk of failure, actual failure, negotiation, and surprise involved in open-endedly and openheartedly creating the life—and the working life—you want.

game itself. If you are making a work of art in any area of life, you are not going from a known point A to a known point B. You are inventing point B.

Work—whether literal employment or showing up presently in any area of your life—has dignity. Pope Francis himself worked as both a chemical lab technician and a nightclub bouncer before going to seminary in 1957.

Thinking about your life as a whole ecosystem

I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.

The investment portfolio depends on ownership stakes.