We are not only writers, We Are Designers of our Lives!

First off, credit due where credit is due. This journal was inspired by something I read in a Writers Digest Magazine. The Author Fred White discussed how to bring out your inner inspirations for writing, and I thought the same could apply to any art form.

The bottom point of his article was: Writers (Artists as well) don't wait to be inspired. It is possible to draw without inspiration. It's also possible to draw without creativity. 

My take: You can have amazing drawing skills and still not be very creative. But where is the fun in that? Face it, creativity and motivation are like chocolate and milk, separated they are neat, but together they make a cup of awesome. So bottom line is, it's worth it to try and be more creative when doing artwork.

Chapter 1: Inspiration: Your friend or enemy? 

Show of hands, who here got into drawing because of another person’s work? I know I did. Inspiration can be a wonderful, uplifting thing that motivates you to draw. When you lack motivation to draw, turn to your favorite artists! They can give you some amazing focus. What aspects do you like about their work? Their style? Content? Coloring?

But there can be a down side to that. Too much inspiration will cause you to shadow them. Sure, no one person can own a style, but do you really want to mimic them, or be your own person? Another tip is to talk to the artist you admire. The worst thing they will do is ignore you. I get ignored a lot. But sometimes they talk to me. You can talk to them about where they get inspiration, to try and help get YOU on the right creative path. 


Chapter 2: Senses and your creativity. 

As an artist, the most important sense to you is your sight (at least most of the time). But don’t just get stuck on that one sense! You have four other senses that can help you develop your creativity. Music is probably the next largest inspiration. Anyone else imagine when they listen to music? Anyone else picture their characters in some cheesy music video? In a cartoon? Doing epic things? Yes, music can dance a beautiful waltz with your mind. But don’t ignore those images you see when you listen to music! Write them down, what you see, how you feel, and try to portray them in your pictures. Music is drawing those images, thoughts, feelings, from a part of your mind that you can’t access easily without incentive. Movies and books can also be a great inspiration. I bet a few of you watch movies and get some awesome ideas pushing their way into your mind as you watch them. 


Chapter 3: When dreams become reality. 

Do you ever lie in bed at night, and ideas just seem to pop into your head? More so than during the day? Especially if you’ve been drawing/writing? There is a reason for that. You have many different levels of conscious thought. Basically, right now you are thinking of things that you don’t even know you are thinking of. Oh yes! Just like Music also helps release these thoughts, as mentioned above, resting the mind can draw them out as well. 

Meditation: freeing your mind from thought helps those dormant creative ideas to break lose. No, meditation doesn’t mean sitting in the middle of the floor cross-legged and chanting. It just means concentrating on something you wouldn’t normally concentrate on. If you push away all the common thoughts: TV, what you have to buy at the store, work, friends, future projects, you clear your mind for thoughts that might not be as pressing. But it’s in those thoughts that you draw out past events or experiences, images or ideas that got pushed into the back of your mind that might inspire you. The way a character looks, an idea for composition.

What you need to do now is build on those thoughts. The more creative ideas you get on paper, the more your creativity will grow, making NEW ideas bloom! 


Chapter 4: Who, what, when, where, why? HOW??! 


If you have original characters, I bet you have some kind of special connection to them. Play out their life in your head. Sit down and picture YOU are your character. Where do they live? What hobbies do they have? What conflicts do they share? How would your character react to everyday problems you face? Refer back to Chapter 2, get inside their head, what they smell, feel, see... do they live in a fantasy world? What makes it so different from our world? Scribble all this down. Try looking at things in OUR world and give them a twist. 

Let’s do a simple test: how does your character get around? No, not in a sexual way, I mean transportation. Dirty, dirty minds you people have. 

In the real world, people where I live drive cars.

They do not have cars in my character’s world.

So how do they get around? In a fantasy world, many people might say “my character flies around on a dragon. That’s good, but let’s try something different. Giant wolves? Nah. How about bugs? 

Yeah! 

Giant centipedes, now that’s fun. But let’s draw on a little saddle for them. And let’s research different bugs and combine different elements of several bugs to make new species! How would this affect the streets where my characters live? Would they have to wear special clothing if some bugs were slimy? What about flying bugs, would the rider’s outfits change to compensate for wind? What if the bugs are intelligent? Do my characters hire the bugs for a price? 

So, taking one idea and developing it snaps your creativity into action. 

My most favorite thing to do is look up many different species and try to combine their anatomy to make a unique character. 

Environments can be done in the same way.

RESEARCH is the key to character, environment, etc. development. Who, what, when, where, why. Use what you got! Use what you know. 

The world is a beautiful place, you just have to know where to look. With the internet it makes it all the more easy. 

Chapter 5: stick to it. 

I like fantasy art, so I mostly do fantasy art. It’s good to have variety, but when you’re a growing artist it’s also good to focus on something, to build up one idea enough that creativity comes naturally and your world fits together without feeling awkward. I am still trying to develop worlds, and I find focus is helping, but I have a loooong way to go. I often find myself creatively constipated. 

Chapter 6: Resources for getting that idea on paper. 

I wanted to add another little section about how you can get those ideas down onto paper. Obviously, the more you practice, the better you’ll be at making the idea you see in your head transfer onto paper. But here are some tips that might help:

Don’t just draw one picture. Do several sketches, and take the picture that best resembles what you see in your mind. Do these sketches quickly: don’t get hung up on detail. Jot down notes while the image is fresh. 

Most people are stuck on line art, but that’s only a small part of the picture. When you get an idea for an image, be sure to stop and think about WHY that picture appeals to you. Is it your idea for composition? Is it the colors? The design? The pose? Perspective? Don’t get stuck on just one aspect of the picture. 

When you have those idea, make them GROW. Start some research looked up poses/clothing/ anything that might bring you closer to your goal. There are TONS of online resources to make this possible, many for free.

The Three Key Elements of
Irresistible Email Subject Lines

Email is back.
Despite repeated proclamations of its extinction, rumors of the death of email marketing have been greatly exaggerated — especially since email and social media are a powerful combination. You might not reach the average college freshman, but for slightly older types (you know, the ones with the money), email is still the way to go in many lucrative mainstream niches.
You must first, of course, get your emails read. And it all starts with the subject line.
Email subject lines are a form of headline. They perform the same function as a headline by attracting attention and getting your email content a chance to be read.
So, headline fundamentals still apply. But the context is different, with the email space having its own funky little quirks that need to be accounted for.
Here’s the good news — email also implies a special relationship with the reader; a relationship that will get more of your messages read, even with subject lines that wouldn’t work in other headline contexts. Let’s take a look back at headline fundamentals, the specifics that apply to subject lines, and the “secret sauce” that makes email your top conversion channel.

1. The Fundamentals:

When you’re writing your next subject line, run it through this checklist, based on the Four “U” Approach to headline writing:

• Useful: Is the promised message valuable to the reader?
• Ultra-specific: Does the reader know what’s being promised?
• Unique: Is the promised message compelling and remarkable?
• Urgent: Does the reader feel the need to read now?

When you’re trying to get someone to take valuable time and invest it in your message, a subject line that properly incorporates all four of these elements can’t miss. And yet, execution in the email context can be tricky, so let’s drill down into subject-line specifics for greater clarity.

2. The Specifics:

Beyond headline fundamentals, these are the things to specifically focus on with email subject lines:

• Identify yourself: Over time, the most compelling thing about an email message should be that it’s from you. Even before then, your recipient needs to know at a glance that you’re a trusted source. Either make it crystal clear by smart use of your “From” field, or start every subject line with the same identifier. 
• Useful and specific first: Of the four “U” fundamentals, focus on useful and ultra-specific, even if you have to ignore unique and urgent. There are plenty of others who work at unique and urgent with every subject line — we call them spammers. Don’t cross the line into subject lines that are perceived as garbage. But do throw in a bit of a tease.
• Urgent when it’s useful: When every message from you is urgent, none is. Use urgency when it’s actually useful, such as when there’s a real deadline or compelling reason to act now. If you’re running your email marketing based on value and great offers, people don’t want to miss out and need to know how much time they have.
• Rely on spam checking software: We all know that certain words trigger spam filters, but there’s a lot of confusion out there about which words are the problem. Is it okay to use the word “free” in a subject line? Actually, yes. All reputable email services provide spam checking software as part of the service or as an add-on. Craft your messages with compelling language, let the software do its job, and adjust when you have to.
• Shorter is better: Subject line real estate is valuable, so the more compact your subject line, the better. Don’t forget useful and ultra-specific, but try to compress the fundamentals into the most powerful promise possible.

3. The Secret Sauce:

Getting someone to trust you with their email address is not easy.

But if you do gain that initial trust, and more importantly, confirm and grow it, you can write pretty lame subject lines and people will still read your messages. Just as with that ditzy friend from high school who nonetheless always has something interesting to say, trust and substance matter most.
Don’t get me wrong, writing great subject lines combined with the more intimate relationship email represents is much more effective. And you have to get your initial messages read to establish the relationship in the first place. Regardless, your open rates will improve based on the quality of your subject line.
But there’s something special in this jaded digital age about being invited into someone’s email inbox. You just have to over-deliver on the value to ensure you’re a treasured guest who gets invited back.

The inbox can be a stressful place. How do you make it brighter?

 Y4RYT86E29NV

Older but Not Wiser? The Psychology Behind Seniors' Susceptibility to Scams

New studies help explain why, despite having more experience, senior citizens often make unprofitable financial choices.

The invitations come in the mail, covered in large print: "Investment Workshop—Free Gourmet Lunch!" "Avoid the Biggest Financial Mistakes Seniors Make!" "Protect Your Financial Security!"

At the lunch, the salmon is accompanied by an investment pitch, with reminders that "there's a high rate of return," and "only a few opportunities are left."

Many of these free lunch seminars are scams aimed at retirees. Nearly six million seniors have attended such seminars in the past three years, the senior advocacy group AARP estimates—although conventional wisdom says that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Despite their years of experience, however, older people are more likely to err in their financial decisions by overemphasizing potential benefits and downplaying potential risks. Now insights from psychology, economics and neuroscience may help us understand why and how those errors occur.

Older adults aren't as upset by possible financial losses as young people are, psychological research has shown, and Stanford University researchers found in a recent brain-imaging study that seniors' brains don't anticipate a loss as much as younger ones do. That might be leading them to make less rational—and therefore less profitable—choices. But the news isn't all bad; a better understanding of why these mistakes happen may make it easier to prevent them.


How aging affects financial choices
Economists have studied how aging impacts real-life financial behavior. Harvard University economist David Laibson and his colleagues looked at a variety of choices people make about loans and credit cards, in a study in 2009. They found that people on the younger and older ends of the age spectrum ended up making more mistakes—that is, decisions that cost them money—than did middle-aged people. For home equity loans, for instance, 25-year-olds and 80-year-olds had loans with annual percentage rates of about 6 percent; 50-year-olds had rates of 5.5 percent. On average, across the different types of choices, people made the fewest mistakes at age 53.

Good financial choices require both strategy and execution, an understanding of how financial systems work, and the mental acuity to find and choose the best option. Strategy becomes easier with age, Laibson suggests, but the execution gets harder. "Experience brings improvement," he says, "but after a point, that accumulation of experience starts to get overwhelmed by decline of cognitive function."

This hypothesis matches up with what psychologists know about cognitive aging. "There's a pretty straightforward story," says Scott Huettel, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies decision-making and aging at Duke University's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. "More or less all of our cognitive abilities decline throughout the life span." A large body of research has shown that a wide variety of skills, including memory, analytical reasoning and processing speed, decrease as we age. The one thing that stays constant or even increases, Huettel says, is crystallized intelligence, a person's accrued knowledge about the world—in other words, experience.

But it's not just memory and reasoning that matter. "We use our gut feelings and our emotions to guide us to make decisions," says Mara Mather, a psychologist who studies aging, emotion and memory at the University of Southern California School of Gerontology. Contrary to stereotype, older people generally feel more optimistic than young people do, and are more likely to focus on the potential upsides of a situation. As people age and begin to feel that their time is limited, some researchers suggest, they seek out emotional fulfillment. This tendency to focus on the positive changes the decisions older people make.

Brain changes and bank changes

The Stanford team of psychologists and neuroscientists, meanwhile, are studying how those cognitive and emotional effects of aging play out in the brain during financial decision-making. Functional brain imaging can be notoriously difficult to interpret on its own, but combined with behavioral research, it may help researchers answer the question: As people age, what changes in the brain are tied to less change in the bank?

It's important to note that increased activity in a particular brain area doesn't mean that area is making people think or feel a certain way. Brain imaging lets neuroscientists associate a mental activity—like a thought or a feeling—and a brain region. The data do not inform on causation, but when brain scans are matched up with behavioral results, they can help scientists suss out which brain areas play a role in that thought process or emotion.

The researchers found that younger and older adults felt equally good when expecting a gain, and they showed the same increase in activity in the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain important in anticipating rewards.

When expecting a loss, however, younger and older adults responded differently. Younger adults reported being more upset and showed higher blood flow in the insula, a part of the brain implicated in negative emotions. As the amount of money at stake increased, so did negative feelings and insula activation. The older adults, on the other hand, didn't feel as bad as younger adults did, and showed less activation in the insula.This doesn't mean that older people don't care if they lose money.Rather, it shows their bias toward the positive at work in their brains.They weren't getting as anxious about the prospect of losing money as the younger adults were.

Whereas looking on the bright side is emotionally beneficial, it has drawbacks in financial decision-making, when it's important to consider possible losses. Think of the "high rate of return" promised at the lunch seminar. Sounds great, but big returns usually require big risks. If they're not worrying about those risks, the seniors at that seminar might be more likely to sign up, even if the investment isn't a good one overall. The same could be true for a range of financial decisions. Seniors might shrug off a credit card's high interest rates, for instance, if they're focused on a program that offers great rewards.

The risks of random choices
In a more recent study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience in January 2010, Samanez-Larkin and the other researchers asked younger and older adults to participate in an investment game, again while in an MRI machine. On each turn, people could choose among two types of stock, randomly deemed either "good" or "bad" by a computer, and a bond, which always yielded $1. The participants, however, were not informed which stocks the computer labeled bad or good. Whereas the good stock yielded a $10 gain half the time, 25 percent of the time it would yield nothing, and in the remaining percentage, a $10 loss. For the bad stock, the probabilities of gain and loss were reversed, with a loss occurring half the time, etcetera. People weren't told the outcomes of each stock after each turn, but deduced them as the game went on—much the way people pick stocks to invest in based on past performance.

The researchers found that older people were just as skilled as younger people at balancing the safe bonds with the riskier stocks. In other words, they didn't make many mistakes because they acted in a risk-averse manner, as is often assumed of older people.

But when it came to choosing between the good and bad stocks, older people were significantly more likely to choose the bad one than younger people were. Before making a risky decision, all subjects showed increased activation in the nucleus accumbens, the same region that was activated by expecting a gain in the previous study. Now they were expecting the reward of a risky, but ultimately profitable, choice. But in older adults this pre-risk activity in the nucleus accumbens was much noisier, with more variability in its strength and timing.

This variability in nucleus accumbens activity could be linked to difficulty in picking the right stock, says Brian Knutson, a Stanford neuroscientist working on the study who researches emotion and decision-making. Older people "might be choosing more randomly when they take risks," due to fuzzier signals in the nucleus accumbens that don't clearly differentiate the good stock from the bad.

Anyone who invests in the stock market takes on some risk, but they generally do it expecting to make a profit. This study suggests it can be particularly hard for older people to differentiate profitable risks from unprofitable ones. Even if their current, more conservative portfolios will probably earn more than the new investment being touted at the lunch seminar, older people might be more ready to risk them after being misinformed by scammers because they are too optimistic about the chances of profitable returns on risky investments.

But a clearer understanding of the obstacles to good financial decision-making that older people face suggests some ways to clear the path.  Providing clear information about the average payout of a stock—which many investment companies do—can help older people tell goods risks from bad, Knutson says. If older people know they're prone to focus on the upside of their financial decisions, taking the time to think carefully about possible losses might help them avoid costly choices. And since they're more likely to err, older people can benefit from listening to a trusted advisor before making big financial decisions—and, perhaps, by throwing out any free lunch invitations that come in the mail, or at least attending and ignoring the scammers' pitch while eating lunch on their dime.

What "The Social Network" have to do with us?

Looks familiar? The movie The Social Network, the massive social networking site Facebook gets the big-screen treatment with this Columbia Pictures production scripted by The West Wing's Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher ("The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button"). The film focuses on Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg's (Jesse Eisenberg) ladder to the top after creating one of the biggest Internet sensations. Justin Timberlake co-stars as Napster co-creator Sean Parker, with Andrew Garfield filling the role of ousted Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.

What does this movie relates to us? It relates about our public private lives.

In Malaysia, some topics, childbirth included, are still socially baulked at but if you log onto any of the social networks, you will see that Malaysians are no passive wallflowers. From political views and religious beliefs to who they are dating and what they had for lunch, many Malaysian are eager to share their personal information. Malaysians, it revealed, spent the most time--nine hours weekly on social networking sites compared with other nationals worldwide.

Just have a look at your own Facebook homepage, look at how some people post, you will get worried, "don't they realise that everyone can read this?"

Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg quoted saying. "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. The social norm of the past generation have evolved rapidly overtime, now it's the new norm.

The revolution of Social Media- "NEW NORM"

Acts of divulging excessive personal information on the internet or "over-sharing" as it is defined by Webster's New World Dictionary -is hardly a new phenomenon. Everyone wants to be out there on the internet. The new cyber-social behaviour works on the conceit that everyone in a person's social circle not only wants to know, but needs to know, what the person is having for lunch. But really, do people need to know in detail what you are doing every minute of the day and where? 

The implications of social network to us? Is there any?

Social network is creating a thin line between the personal and public and coupled with the cultural and global shift, people are struggling to find the balance. Compare the past generation and now, people used to have an anonymous or a secret identity online to post explicit stuff about themselves. Now everyone keeps their real identity when they go online but they still post their secrets or intimate and explicit information about themselves online.

It's normal for a person to want to share his or her personal information with others. Exposing oneself and sharing personal details are rooted in basic psychological needs. However, if these needs are not met within family and warm blooded relationships, then it will begin in cyberspace where it is pretty cold but gives a false hope of warmth. From an observation, oversharing may also be a trend because we are living in a world where "people want friends and don't have any". Either they are stuck behind their PCs at work or they spend so many hours in the office and behind a screen that being part of social networks is important. So, they begin to share more and more about themselves until they expose themselves without realizing it or understanding the consequences.

It's important to know your friends on Facebook, you need to ask yourself who they are. Either you are befriending people whom you don't know or those whom you should not be friends with. Or it just means your real life sucks, you have to improve your social skills. With the right knowledge, people can control their tendencies to overshare.

Think twice when you want to post something in the future, remember when you post anything on the internet, it will be available basically to the whole world.