Welcome to the new home of my blog, Newvine Growing! For a decade now, I’ve written about what I describe as evolution, revolution and living life intentionally.
Category: creativity
When I was in business school, we joked that cleaning the bathroom never sounds as good as when you have an exam to study for. Usually cleaning the bathroom sounds tedious and dirty, but compared to feeling confused or overwhelmed by difficult material, scrubbing the toilet feels like safe harbor.
Lara Zielin’s book, “Author Your Life: How One Writer Changed Her Life Through the Power of Storytelling, and How Your Can, Too,” comes out Tuesday.
Lately I have been marveling at my friends’ capacity to surprise me. Which makes me so happy! When I love someone and I think I’ve got her figured out, it’s a joy to be reminded that humans have infinite potential to change and evolve.
Artist Rick Midler hand painted a pair of pants for me, after interviewing me about what I love and what I’m passionate about. The design reflects my values.
Nan Sanders Pokerwinski weighs the winter options: Stay in and make progress on projects she’s been itching to get into or go enjoy activities with friends?
Though the 10 years I’ve been in New York are apparently long enough to give myself permission to buy some pretty outrageous clothing and jewelry, the Midwesterner in me worries my choices might be too far from the norm. I imagine arriving at a party, a restaurant or the office and all of a sudden it’s middle school again and the cool girls are snickering.
Lately I have been pondering what else I can do with our living room concerts — showing art on the walls while musicians perform, hosting writers for a reading in between music sets? Or maybe I try something different entirely — a home-based supper club idea with food or cocktails as the focus instead of music?
I don’t know many people who don’t have goals or aspirations but almost everyone I know feels the tension of not accomplishing what they’d like. Some people struggle to find their passions but it seems many more have an idea in mind yet keep getting pulled away by distractions, procrastination and just life itself. Why is that? A blog post by Jennifer…
Not long into the first day of a weekend improv retreat, one of the women asked somewhat plaintively, how can we get to this place in real life? How can we be comfortable risking embarrassing ourselves and how can support other people in taking risks?
Lara Zielin was inspired by reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic” and running into Josh Gates from “Expedition Unknown” to overcome fear and have adventures again.
A recent visit to my hometown had me reminiscing about one of my favorite high school jobs. As a teenager, I lucked into a surreal collection of work experiences. My first job, if you don’t count baby-sitting in middle school, was as a clown. I hosted children’s birthday parties, painting kids’ faces, making balloon animals and running a series of loud,…
We’ve been invited to join one of the elaborate villages that particularly impressed me last time, Black Rock French Quarter. A collection of camps surround a structure that echoes the design of the New Orleans French Quarter, with offerings including a bakery, a farmers market, a bath house, and our camp, Golden Cafe.
Celebrating its lucky 13th year on playa, the Golden Cafe is your home for exotic cocktails and live music since 2003.
I’m planning a day-long marketing workshop with a friend who is, among other things, an improv actress. If you know nothing else about improvisation, you might recognize the foundational concept of “Yes, and,” which encourages actors to accept what others do on stage and build on it. Everything about the creation of this marketing workshop we’re calling “Learning to market yourself…
Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight.
If your workplace doesn’t have a culture of truly letting people leave their cares behind when they take vacation — or if it’s frowned upon to even take vacation — maybe you can tell your boss that you need some task-negative time in order to tap into your best problem-solving insights?
Death has been close to me recently. Our neighbor died, my dad’s brother died, a business school classmate died. I am aware of our mortality but these various losses have brought that difficult truth front and center. In this already vulnerable state, I read Laurie Anderson’s farewell to Lou Reed in Rolling Stone. It seems every journalist and musician had…
Earlier this year, New York magazine ran an article headlined “How to Read 31 Books in Four Minutes.” Far more abridged than even Cliff Notes, the article included just a handful of ideas from each self-help book. Maybe the universe will collapse in on itself if I further summarize an already very brief synopsis of some of the books they…
Earlier this week I blogged about one theme I heard in digital marketing conversations at South by Southwest Interactive — authenticity — but the panel that really rocked me was about serendipity: Serendipity is a fuzzy concept that has a powerful effect on our lives. More than blind luck, it’s the product of lots of passion, insight, or proximity. As…
I didn’t know much about David Foster Wallace when he died. I’d read a few of his essays and his widely circulated commencement address at Kenyon College, but that was the extent of it. The intensity of the reaction from well-read friends when Wallace committed suicide gave me a view into how admired he was. Flash forward a few years,…