Finding Flow
For many of us elusive and mourning its absence in our lives. How to find it? And more importantly how to drop into it more frequently? Most of us want this to be a behaviour that we can initiate with a catalyst we have developed. What would this look like? Meditation? Brainstorming? Today’s work and…
The 10,000-Hour Misunderstanding: Why Your Creative Tool Isn’t Working Yet
There's a particular kind of frustration that creative people know well. You've bought the course. You've set up the software. You've got the subscription, the new app, the account. You've done everything they said on the landing page. And nothing's changed. The website exists but it's empty. The Notion dashboard is beautiful but unloved. The…
The Palette That Taught Me Everything About Creative Overflow
Your palette gets clogged. So does your brain. Here's what to do about both. There's a very specific feeling when you've been painting for a while and you look down at your palette. What started as clean, distinct pools of colour — a cool white here, a warm ochre there, a strip of ultramarine blue…
The Creative Life Has to Pay. Here’s What I’ve Learned About Making That Happen.
Success is freedom. Getting there requires being honest about the maths. There's a conversation that comes up in every teaching context I've been part of, sooner or later. Someone is doing genuinely good work. They love it. They're skilled at it. Their students or clients or audience are getting real value from it. And they're…
Is Bill Bryson the Greatest Advance in Human Civilisation?
An argument for why great communicators matter more than isolated geniuses. I want to make an argument that might annoy some people, so let me state it clearly upfront: The ability to make complex things accessible is more valuable to the world than the ability to produce complex things in the first place. I'll use…
One Idea, Three Channels: Stop Reinventing the Wheel Every Time You Post
You don't need more content ideas. You need to stop treating every platform like it needs something different. Here's a confession: I spent the first several months of trying to build an online presence treating every platform like a completely separate publication. Instagram needed visual content. Substack needed long-form writing. YouTube needed video. Each platform…
Using AI to Clean Up Your Thinking (Not Replace It)
The most useful thing AI has done for my creative work is help me hear what I'm actually saying. I've been experimenting with using AI to process my voice memo transcriptions, and something unexpected has come out of it. Not what you might think. Not "the AI generates my content" — if that's what you…
Why Where You Are Changes What You Make
The Italian lakes taught me something about place that I couldn't have learned in a studio. There's a particular kind of day that I think every artist needs to collect. Not the productive studio session. Not the workshop where everything goes right. Not the morning walk that generates three voice memos worth of material. Those…
How Not to Waste Your Rich Creative Vein
You're in a good patch. Here's why that's also the most dangerous time. There are periods — if you've been doing creative work long enough, you'll know exactly what I'm describing — where you hit a vein. The ideas are coming. Good ones. Connections you haven't made before. Things clicking into place in the way…
Stop Perfecting. Start Publishing.
The course I never released taught me more than the ones I did. I have a skill. It's one of the ones I'm most genuinely proud of, actually, and also one of the ones that has caused me the most trouble. I follow rabbit holes. An area catches my attention — really catches it, not…
The Cost of Waiting Until It’s Perfect
I spent months building something brilliant. Then I spent years not showing it to anyone. I recorded this particular voice memo three times before I got the version I kept. Three times. The first two were fine — the thinking was there, the ideas were solid — but something felt off. The microphone wasn't positioned…
Draw Something Every Day. Seriously. Just One Thing.
Not a grand artistic statement. Not a finished piece. Just a mark, every day, that proves you showed up. I have a five-year planner on my desk. Not a habit tracker. Not a productivity app. An actual physical five-year planner — the kind where you can see five years of your life laid out in…
Damian Sémonin
Artist, educator and founder of CreativePath52 — helping people make the transition to a creative career.
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