THERE IS NO TEMPLATE IN THIS EMAIL.

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One thing no one's gonna tell you (but I will):

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There is no easy way to get from inexperienced to master, from student to professor.

From bottle rocket to dick-shaped space thing. (Remember this?)

There just isn’t.

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There are, however, plenty of promises out there.

If aliens were to land on our planet, they would assume they could assimilate quite easily into humanity by logging onto the internet and entering their email enough times to create an entirely templatized life.

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Of course, I did ask you for your email address. Why?

Because I want to give you something valuable.

Something that will actually help you do the work.

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We're almost to the part about the pneumatic tubes!

Afraid you’ll never make anything “original?”
​(And what is original anyway?)

Designers, artists, writers, makers—we have a tendency to seek and utilize inspiration that comes from within our tiny, tiny world.

I find that useful when trying to learn how to complete a task or learn a new skill.

But for putting something new out into the world?

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You need bigger eyes.

Or at least an appetite for the seemingly banal and/or...well, anything really.

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A great example of this is pneumatic tubes (AKA "the dream that will never die").

Few things give me as much joy and inspiration as this impossibly clunky yet empirically graceful mechanism.

I love spotting them in the wild, as they are endangered creatures. Unless you still bank in real life?

I loved explaining them to my husband who is brilliant but had no idea what that sound was when we were in the Wallgreen's drive-through. THAT'S THE SOUND OF A HYPERLOOP, MY DEAR!

I really love the fact that pneumatic tubes gave me the sliver of an idea for a novel (unfinished), and the exaggerated confidence to suggest replacing expeditors with suckable canisters to a restaurant client (rejected, and note: this was the only instance where I promoted robot labor over human, I think).

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The end of the email has no secret template reveal!

But it does have some helpful tips to increase your field of vision:

• Take a picture of something you’re unfamiliar with or curious about
• Write down questions that pop into your head and what made you think of it (you don’t necessarily have to find the answers, by the way)
• Take screen shots of your Google searches from time to time: these make for interesting thought/work product combinations
• Gather things and organize them so you can look at them individually and within a folder or grouping (I email myself pictures and notes so I can flag them and then I organize them more intentionally)

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Remember: big eyes out there, alright? 👀

Give me something else to obsess over besides fancy vacuums that make the sound pfuuuuuuutde. Please.