Every Wednesday I share five things I've liked and think you might like too. Here are this week’s Five Things…

1. An Instagram account where album art meets classical art.

2. The worrying effects of social media on our mental health. My takeaway: Using social media for real conversations, building communities and sharing your work is a positive thing, whilst using social media too much and to compare yourself to others is not good.

3. A wonderful project detailing the hidden treasures found along the banks of the river Amstel in Amsterdam during recent excavations for a new metro line. Here's an introduction to the project and here's what they found.

4. Better ways to learn. Space out your learning sessions, take notes, test yourself and get plenty of sleep!

5. What a tune. 🎶 Tame Impala - Let It Happen

That's all for this week. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and you'll get the next one delivered to your inbox.

Every Wednesday I share five things I've liked and think you might like too. Here are this week’s Five Things…

1. An interesting piece on the idea of a growth vs fixed mindset — "You can tell kids that they’ve done something fantastic, but don’t label them as smart"

2. I have a new favourite iOS game, Pocket Run Pool. It really helped me through my recent 2-hour stint of being stuck on the runway on the way home from Berlin!

3. A great Youtube series from Holistic Songwriting analysing the writing styles of various artists. I'm only partway through but have learnt a lot.

4. This Twitter thread of neural net-generated jokes is rather amusing. The jokes are only funny because they are terrible, but I did enjoy them all the same.

5. I've been really enjoying Jonas Bonnetta's album All This Here. I really like his use of field recordings.

That's all for this week. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and you'll get the next one delivered to your inbox.

Every Wednesday I share five things I've liked and think you might like too. Here are this week’s Five Things…

1. A great piece on learning. Aim for fluency, not just understanding.

2. Useful (short) video: This is how (not) to calm your nerves

3. I'm definitely guilty of this at times: "We tend to grossly overestimate the pleasure brought forth by new experiences and underestimate the power of finding meaning in current ones." The quote is from this excellent piece: Travel Is No Cure for the Mind.

4. Cool interactive website: www.populationspast.org. Explore demographic and social change using maps of the UK between 1851-1911. How far we've come in the last 100 years or so!

5. What I was listening to in April 🎶

That's all for this week. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and you'll get the next one delivered to your inbox.

I had two main takeaways from watching this interview with the cartoonist and musician James Kochalka.

The first:

"If you are a creative person and you're good at one thing you're probably good at another thing"

Creativity compounds (knowledge builds on knowledge) so you'll probably find that some ways of thinking or skills overlap between the different activities.

And the second:

If you want to get better at something, do it every day, and work hard at getting better at it. That last bit is really important, simply repeating an activity isn't enough — you have to focus on improving to get better.

You start by imperfectly copying someone or something that inspires you. You keep copying, making mistakes and drawing inspiration from other sources. And eventually, you find you've made something new and original.

This short post (and its title) was inspired by a far more insightful one by Austin Kleon called Copying is how we learn. If you like that you should also check out his book Steal Like An Artist, which is excellent.