…you can build it. 🙂 I don’t know why I love this TED Talk from artist Janet Echelman so much. I just know that I do. Maybe it’s her perseverance. After all, she was rejected by seven art schools after college and yet didn’t give up but struck out on her own. Maybe it’s her resourcefulness. When her paints didn’t show up for a show she promised to do in India, she turned to the local fishermen and solicited their help in producing a new piece of art…and art form. Maybe it’s her relentlessness. Again and again, there weren’t materials or technology yet suitable to execute her ideas, so each time she found partners to...

Stories are powerful. The stories we tell each other, the stories we create to help us make sense of our lives, the stories we hear or read from others. Stories are powerful because, I believe, we are narrative beings – we make sense of and share our lives through the concrete plots and characters of stories. Even though the scenes of most stories we tell or hear are not exactly the same as events in our life, the are like elements of our life, and that similarity connects us not only to the story in question but to each other. Stories are powerful. Which is probably why film is such an incredible medium. It allows artists to take a story...

Neil Pasricha didn’t start out to create a killer-blog, he was just going through a really, really hard time and decided he either needed to look for some of the simple joys and pleasures of life or… well, he actually wasn’t sure what else he would do. And so he had a simple idea – notice the small delights of life and share them on a blog. And he executed it really well – these ideas are often quite simple and yet, perhaps for that reason, take you off guard. And it doesn’t hurt that his posts are written with care. 1000 Awesome Things became his project and blog. It received a couple of hits, and then a couple dozen, and then a...