When you have a free hour or afternoon every now and then, spend it strategically on activities that can grow your business, like:<ul><li>Asking clients and colleagues for feedback</li><li>Comparing your finished work with the clients’ published versions</li><li>Getting your projects ready to go</li><li>Putting the 80/20 rule to the test (Which 20% of your clients or your work generates 80% of your income? What 20% of your time drives 80% of your productivity?)</li><li>Creating a list of things to buy (things you could buy to build your business once you have a little extra money)</li><li>Learning a new skill or improving a skill I have.</li></ul>

Ways Creative Pros Can Build Their Business During a Slump

Take advantage of downtime to take a step back and try some strategies that will make your career and your business stronger

Stashed ideas

6 Ways Creative Pros Can Build Their Business During a Slump

Being a consistent student is nice and great. But, it also prevents you from becoming experimental and creative. This is because creativity and experimentation involve the risk of failure. It requires you to move away from your usual study routines or to-go-to project goals, and try new things. Experimentation and creativity demand inconsistency.

Sometimes creativity meant inconsistency

Welcome to Deepstash

Jeanne Marie Quinanola on Oct 13

It’s killing your creativity. Typically, getting views mean you’re creating valuable work for your audience, whether it’s articles like this one, videos, or Instagram posts.But one of the symptoms of writing expressly for views is that you begin to cater not for yourself, or for your audience, but for the middle man — the algorithm.This is true pretty much anywhere you post online.

Posting content on platforms for views

<ul><li>They are themed storytelling contests. Vocal chooses a theme, either broad or narrow, and offers cash prizes to the winners.</li><li>The Challenges to be really freeing: you read a prompt and then you can develop that idea any way you want.</li><li>Vocal often chooses to partner with brands for these Challenges. It’s a good way to bridge the gap between payment models.&nbsp;</li><li>Writing for a Challenge is an excellent way to get off the treadmill of hunting for views, and focus on your own creativity and imagination.</li></ul>

 Vocal Challenges

Typically, getting views mean you’re creating valuable work for your audience, whether it’s articles like this one, videos, or Instagram posts. But one of the symptoms of writing expressly for views…

Writing for Platforms Has Sucked the Creativity Out of Your Brain

Focusing:<ul><li>concentrating intently on sth you're trying to learn</li><li>sth you're rather familiar with -&gt; thought moves smoothly as if it's traveling along a familiar, nicely paved road</li></ul>Diffuse thinking:<ul><li>more relaxed, related to a set of neural resting states</li><li>for new ideas/ approaches</li><li>looking at things broadly from a big picture perspective -&gt; making new neural connections &amp; pathways</li><li>it’s not for problem solving/finest aspects of sth, but&nbsp;for getting to the initial place you need to be in to home in on a solution</li></ul>Each helps us to learn, but you can't be in both modes at the same time.

Focused & Diffuse Modes - two modes of thinking

<ul><li>Relaxed in a chair, letting his mind go free, often still vaguely thinking about what he had been previously focusing on</li><li>A key in his hand, dangling it just above the floor</li><li>As he would fall asleep, the key would fall from his hand waking him up, just in time so he could gather up those diffuse mode connections &amp; ideas</li><li>Then going back into the focused mode, he‘d build on these connections</li></ul>

Salvador Dali’s Technique to Be Creative 

Thomas Edison used the same technique as Dali, only with a ball.When you're learning something new, especially something that's a little more difficult, your mind needs to be able to go back and forth between the 2 different learning modes. That's what helps you learn effectively. To gain muscular structure, you need to do a little work every day, gradually allowing your muscles to grow.Similarly, to build neuro-structure, you need to do the same. A little work every day, gradually allowing yourself to grow. That’s the trick.

Switching Between The Two Learning Modes 

Neurons become linked together through repeated use. The more abstract sth is, the more important it’s to practice to bring those ideas into reality for you.<ul><li>If you first begin to understand sth, e.g. how to solve a problem, the neural pattern is very weak -&gt; a faint pattern</li><li>Solving it again without solution deepens that neuron pattern&nbsp;(darker pattern)</li><li>Going over each step in your mind &amp; practicing on related problems -&gt; dark pattern</li></ul>Practice makes permanent.<ul><li>enriched environment (people around us instead of isolation) &amp; excising creates new neurons -&gt; helps learning + memory</li></ul>

Build & Strengthen Your Neurons

<ul><li>what you're immediately &amp; consciously processing in your mind</li><li>through its connections to other parts of your brain, you can access long term memories</li><li>holds only about 4 chunks of information (researchers said 7 in the past)</li><li>We group memory items into chunks, to make our working memory bigger than it actually is</li></ul>

Working Memory

<ul><li>like a storage warehouse</li><li>it's where you store fundamental concepts &amp; techniques that are often involved in whatever you're learning about</li><li>When you encounter sth new, you often use your working memory to handle it. If you want to move that information into your long term memory, it takes time and practice.&nbsp;You need to repeat it at least a few times or it can be difficult for you to find it later when you might need it.</li></ul>

Long Term Memory

<ul><li>repeat what you're trying to retain, but space this repetition out -&gt; e.g. practice a new voc. word/ a problem solving technique over several days</li><li>Research: if you repeat sth 20times in one evening, you won’t remember nearly as well as if you practice it 20x over several days.&nbsp;</li><li>Like building a brick wall: If you don't leave time for the mortar to dry, that is, time for the synoptic connections to form and strengthen, you won't have a very good structure.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Spaced Repetition 

Metabolic toxins in your brain-&gt; Sleep helps to wash away them, keeps the brain clean &amp; healthyToo little sleep makes you do worse on tests (you can't think clearly)Over too long of a time: headaches, depression, heart disease, diabetes, aging/ dying earlierSleep: <ul><li>important for memory &amp; learning process</li><li>organizing ideas &amp; concepts</li><li>strengthens neural patterns</li><li>improved problem solving &amp; understanding skills</li></ul>Repeat what you want to learn (focused mode) right before you sleep (diffuse m.) + set in mind to dream about it -&gt; increased chance of dreaming -&gt; better understanding

The Importance of Sleep in Learning

= pieces of information bound together through meaning/ useThe new logical whole makes the chunk easier to remember &amp; also makes easier to fit it into the “larger picture”.Just memorizing a fact without understanding is not enough, you have to find a place for it.How does it work?<ol><li>Focused practice + repetition (4 slots of working memory make connections to informations of your brain, when you’re angry/stressed/ afraid-&gt;less of those connections)</li><li>Creation of chunks</li><li>Small chunks becomes larger</li><li>As you gradually become a master of the material, you’ll have more creative interpretations of it</li></ol>

What is a Chunk?

The best chunks are so well ingrained, that you don't even have to consciously think about it.&nbsp;When you're learning new math/science material:<ul><li>Undivided attention. Let your brain focus on chunking.Leave free the limited slots in working memory</li><li>Understand the main idea/connection bw. the basic elements. Start with an example with solution</li><li>Figure out why the steps are taken the way they are. See the key features. Underline principles of a problem</li><li>Concern:it can be all too easy to focus too much on why an individual step works &amp; not on why this particular step’s the next thing you should do!</li></ul>

How to Form a Chunk?

Can you create a chunk if you don't understand? Yes, but it's often a useless chunk that won't fit in with other materials.&nbsp;Just understanding how a problem was solved doesn’t necessarily create a chunk that you can easily remember later. Don't confuse the "Aha!" of a breakthrough in understanding, with solid expertise.Math/science:<ul><li>review it soon after you first learned it</li><li>close the book &amp; test yourself </li><li>solving the problem speeds up your learning. Seeing/ understanding it doesn't mean that you can actually do it. Doing it yourself helps create the patterns</li></ul>

How to Form a Chunk? - Part2

Gain context to see not just how, but also when to use this chunk!How to start with a new topic?<ol><li>Do a 2min. picture walk through a chapter (glancing at pictures &amp; section headings allows you to gain a sense of the big picture to see where it fits in)</li><li>Begin studying it:Learn the major concepts first, then fill in the details</li><li>Go beyond the initial problem, see more broadly. Repeat &amp; practice with both related &amp; unrelated problems</li></ol><ul><li>to see not only when to use the chunk, but when not,</li><li>to build &amp; strengthen each chunk, so you can easily access it whenever you need to</li></ul>

Gain Context

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Learning How to Learn

Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects - Unfinished yet

<ul><li>We don't have one brain in our head—we have three. We started with a “lizard brain” to keep us breathing, then added a brain like a cat’s, and then topped those with the thin layer of Jell-O known as the cortex—the third, and powerful, “human” brain.</li><li>We were not the strongest on the planet but we developed the strongest brains, the key to our survival. The strongest brains survive, not the strongest bodies. Our ability to solve problems, learn from mistakes, and create alliances with other people helps us survive.</li><li>Our ability to understand each other is our chief survival tool.</li></ul>

The human brain evolved ,too .

•Our brains were built for walking - 12 miles a day !• To improve your thinking skills, move.• Exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing it glucose&nbsp;for energy and oxygen to soak up the toxic electrons&nbsp;that are left over. It also stimulates the protein that keeps&nbsp;neurons connecting.• Aerobic exercise just twice a week halves your risk of&nbsp;general dementia. It cuts your risk of Alzheimer’s by 60&nbsp;percent.&nbsp;

Exercise boosts brain power .

An updated and expanded edition of the international bestseller Most of us have no idea what’s really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details that every business leader, parent, and teacher should know — for instance, that physical activity helps to get your brain working at its best. How do we learn? What do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multitasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget — and so important to repeat new information? In Brain Rules, Dr John Medina, a molecular biologist, shares his lifelong interest in brain science, and how it can influence the way we teach our children and the way we work. In each chapter, he describes a brain rule — what scientists know for sure about how our brains work — and offers transformative ideas for our daily lives. In this expanded edition — which includes additional information on the brain rules and a new chapter on music — you will discover how every brain is wired differently, why memories are volatile, and how stress and sleep can influence learning. By the end, you’ll understand how your brain really works — and how to get the most out of it.