Getting Inspiration

I loved this quote:

"The advice I like to give to young artists, or really anybody, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens."

-- Chuck Close (artist)

A nice collection of failed predictions

In an office building I used to work in they had quotes like this all over the place as inspiration. Here is a nice collection of outrageously wrong predictions made by the seminal experts of the time:

It'll Never Work!

Are famous people too media savvy today to make these kinds of proclamations anymore in public?

Cityposh, our second company

Nate and I "soft" launched a second company a couple weeks ago called Cityposh.

On Cityposh we'll be offering up products, services, and experiences to be auctioned off in a "penny auction" format. Winners of auctions we've been running are typically saving 70-90%+ on the items being auctioned.

Here's how it works:

1. Signup with an email address and you'll be sent an email when an auction is beginning.


2. To participate, you'll first buy some bids. Bids cost 50¢ each.


3. Use a bid to move yourself in to first place to win the auction.


4. Each time someone bids, the price of the auctioned item goes up 1¢


5. If you're in first place when time runs out, you win the auction!

There are other sites doing a similar auction format, but they mostly focus on selling products like iPads, watches, sunglasses, etc. After our "soft launch period" of the next couple months, our focus will turn to auctioning "experiences" that you can do in your local area (we'll be starting with Chicago, our hometown.)

For example, we recently auctioned off a gift certificate at Rick Bayless' restaurants here in Chicago that someone got for less than $1 plus the cost of their bids. We've auctioned off a "movie and dessert night" in a local Chicago neighborhood, and we've auctioned off gift certificates from national brands like Whole Foods and Target. Today in fact we're auctioning $50 at Banana Republic.

We've only told a small network of people and they've been really excited about it and having a lot of fun. But we think we're ready to start to grow. And if you sign up and buy some bids (you can spend as little as $5 to get started) you can then refer other people and start to build up a war chest of free bids. Each friend you get to sign up we'll put 5 free bids in their account.

And what does this mean for Inkling? Nothing! Like other projects outside of Inkling we've worked on in the past, we've built something quickly to test to see if it sticks. This is no different, and our dedication to Inkling is unwavering.

Anyways, we look forward to you trying out Cityposh and letting us know what you think!