A library for people who make things.
Every creative discipline teaches craft. None of them teach thinking. One model a week closes that gap: a real person, a concrete moment, the rule, and the first move for tomorrow. Free.
Start with these three.
Three Beginner models, about half an hour in total. Each one changes a decision you will make this week.
First Principles Thinking
Wilbur Wright stood in a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, twisting a cardboard box. 8 min readEisenhower Matrix
Charles Dickens sat at his desk in Devonshire Terrace on an October evening in 1843, reading sales figures for a novel that was bleeding readers. 8 min readFour Stages of Creativity
Henri Poincaré stepped onto an omnibus at Coutances in 1880. 8 min readRecent entries
Sprezzatura
Ginger Rogers walked to the sidelines of the Swing Time set during a break and pulled off her dancing shoes. They were full of blood. The crew at RKO had
Hostile Attribution Bias
Norman Mailer walked into the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in December 1971 with several drinks in him and a plan for his forehead. Gore Vidal sat waiting.
Design Thinking Process
Among the stonecutters at work on the dome of Florence Cathedral, Filippo Brunelleschi took a knife to a turnip, carved the shape of a stone that did not exist yet,
Law of Closure
Scott McCloud drew a man raising an axe over another man's head. In the next panel he drew a city skyline at night with a scream lettered across
Gresham's Law
In Antwerp, in the autumn of 1551, Thomas Gresham stands on the floor of the Bourse and watches an English cloth merchant try to settle a bill. The Flemish trader
The Lighthouse Characteristic
On the night of May 1, 1894, the keepers at Minots Ledge set a new lens turning around the lamp, eighty-five feet above the Atlantic, one mile off Cohasset,
165 thinking frameworks for creatives.
The cognitive architecture behind every creative career that works. 800+ pages of decision-making tools adapted for artists, writers, designers, and musicians.