Inspiration

A week of rejection

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Rejection Therapy at New Seasons

For the past week, I embarked on a quest to move past my fear of rejection through an exercise in Rejection Therapy. The premise is fairly simple: you commit to putting yourself in a situation where you are purposefully rejected each and every day in order to get over the natural fear of rejection. (Thanks to our buddy Graeme for the inspiration.)

When I started this exercise, I was pretty sure that it would be a piece of cake. The prompts seemed fairly effortless and, I figured, I’m pretty used to rejection anyways. (I am the one, after all, who sends out all of our estimates and proposals.) A week in and I can only think that this was incredibly, undeniably naive thinking.


Needmore Weekend Countdown: Our Top 5 Picks for You

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Cherry blossoms

Portland welcomes spring! The swifts and sparrows are singing, the air smells fragrant with camellia blooms, and cherry blossoms float gently amongst the soft breeze. This weekend calls for celebration — from the birth of a new season, to the Passover and Easter holidays, to just good old-fashioned quality time spent with loved ones.

Below you will find our top five Portland picks for fun for this weekend (many of them are free to enjoy).


A-Z: Abstract to Zen

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One of my favorite benefits of living in Portland is the nourishing nature that surrounds our beautiful city. Searching for a creative catalyst, I visited The Portland Japanese Garden (my surefire cure for spring fever). After pausing by the waterfall in the Strolling Pond Garden, I walked up to the pavilion to enjoy the current Art in the Garden exhibit.

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The Portland Japanese Garden celebrates it’s 50th anniversary in 2013. To honor this special occasion, three unique Art in the Garden exhibitions will be featured throughout the year. 50 Prints and Paintings, Toko Shinoda at 100 is the first, on view through this Sunday, March 17th.

Celebrated as one of Japan’s leading modern calligraphers, Japanese artist Toko Shinoda just celebrated her 99th birthday in 2012. Influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, Shinoda has called her work “a balance between dynamism and traditional elegance.” The Art in the Garden exhibit includes a piece of her work from each year of the Garden’s history, starting in 1963 through today.

My impression upon viewing her work: Powerful.

I’ve always been an avid fan of the tactile sensation of viewing calligraphy — you can almost feel the brush in your hand. Walking among the combination of bold, energetic brushstrokes placed vividly amongst active white space — I was transported into Shinoda’s world. I was astonished by her ability to evoke vivid emotions using only minimal form and a select few colors (most pieces used black sumo ink with a touch of gold, red, or blue).

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Personal Favorites from the show included:

In the Twilight, Lithograph with Calligraphy Strokes

Setting Forth, Lithograph with hand added colors gold and gray

Moon and Flowers, Sumi and cinnabar ink on paper

The exhibit ends it run this Sunday, March 17, 2013. Enjoy this rare glimpse from Tokyo while it’s still nestled in the City of Roses.

Have you visited the exhibit? Tweet us your thoughts on Twitter to @needmore.

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Steve Jobs on Simplification

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“When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.”
— Steve Jobs

James Dyson on Invention and Failure

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I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative.

—James Dyson

Milton Glaser on Work

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Great quote from the article Milton Glaser: We’re Always Looking, But We Never Really See this morning.

There’s no such thing as a creative type. As if creativity is a verb, a very time-consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to feel like work.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

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Kandace and I finally got around to seeing this movie last night. It was an inspiration, but like many stories I’ve read recently, it was also a reminder of the consequences of working as obsessively as possible.

There was a lot of meditation on the concept of “taste” in the movie, and I particularly liked this quote from Jiro himself.

If you don’t have good taste, you can’t make good food.

You can’t put it more simply.

Grit

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I have been reading the wonderful – and brief – book Nine Things Successful People Do Differently by Heidi Halvorson. Number 6 is “Have Grit.”

“Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetimes and earn higher college GPAs. Grit predicts which cadets will stick out their first grueling year at West Point. In fact, grit even predicts how far contestants at the Scripps National Spelling Bee will go.

People who lack grit, more often than not, believe that they just don’t have the innate abilities successful people have. If that describes your own thinking, well, there’s no way to put this nicely: you are wrong.

I find some comfort in this, actually, and you should, too. Have grit!

The Buddhist Focus

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“Obsessing over details and bringing a Buddhist level of focus to a narrow assortment of offerings sets Apple apart from its competitors. Buddhism—a faith Jobs studied intensely—teaches that if you are going to prepare a cup of tea, the making of the cup of tea should command all your attention; even this insignificant task should be completed with all the mastery you can bring to it.”

From Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky