Hi Friends—
I first met Jordan in North Carolina back when I was an exchange student on my fourth year of architecture school. We soon realized we shared many creative interests and curiosities.
Ten years later, we bring you a long-form conversation on creative friction, the fine line between passion projects and work, storytelling in design, overcoming the beginner feeling, and lots more. (Take a look at this episode’s chapters to get a better picture of the topics we covered.)
Links
Gray Collab - Jordan’s renderings, photography, and film. Started while freelancing.
Carolina Day School — Asheville, NC by Jordan Gray
Kappa Achievement Park: A Place to Belong by Jordan Gray
Building Information Modeling (BIM) & Revit
Austin Kleon: Pencil vs. Computer on Hurry Slowly
Books
Less But Better by Dieter Rams
Faculty Department Volume 1 by Justin Chung
The Photography Storytelling Workshop by Finn Beales
So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up by Lee Gutkind
168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam
People mentioned
Chapters
00:00 · Intro
01:25 · Photography
02:54 · Lack of time
06:42 · Deliberate practice
11:42 · Skill transferability
18:21 · Maintaining growth and creativity
32:13 · Friction
35:19 · Passion & work
38:43 · Gratification, fulfillment, and satisfaction
44:27 · Storytelling
48:17 · The human experience
51:58 · Deep rebranding
58:34 · Making people feel something
01:00:59 · Personal branding
01:03:23 · Making others seek you out
01:05:45 · The podium
01:09:14 · The chaos of taking pictures
01:13:20 · Overthinking and overdoing
01:14:34 · Will people notice the details?
01:17:23 · Capturing creative moments
01:21:03 · Daily routines to be happier and productive
01:22:45 · Books
01:24:59 · A message to the world
01:27:05 · Enjoying the process of grinding the beans
01:34:39 · Designing versus clicking
01:37:08 · Simplicity
01:42:15 · Learnings on simplicity from making this podcast?
01:46:28 · Connect with Jordan
01:50:53 · Outro
Bonus
🎥 'I'm Never Far From a Good Idea'. A conversation between Atomic Habits author James Clear and Polina Pompliano. The Profile.
📕 Formulations by Andrew Witt. MIT Press. Witt depicts a series of conceptual investigations appealing to the designer minds, tracing the origins of the use of mathematics and scientific methods in architecture.
Lastly, here are the latest stories from my sketches newsletter.
🔑 Algorithmic passwords
⏱ When to-do lists get too long
🪙 Most-visited stories of 2021Submit a question about this or previous episodes. I'd love to hear from you.
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