This blog is written with three specific areas of focus in mind: productivity, creativity, and expression.

First off, a background story. In preparing to write this blog, I took a quick survey of the 50 most popular blogs from Thailand. Here’s what I found:

1. 20.5 of them are in English, the rest in Thai. The 0.5 comes from when a blog is written in both languages, I count them half English, half Thai.

2. The English blogs are almost all about food and travel, which is understandable given that’s what Thailand is famous for.

So at the risk of being under-discovered, I decided to write this blog in English, even though they aren’t about food or travel (one of which, by the way, I’m nuts about). That is because I believe that interest in the three topics I’m going to cover transpires across cultures and regions. Everybody wants to do more with less. (I have yet to come across anyone who says “Geez, I wish I work harder and get less done!”) Most of us aspire to be creative; at least, we often feel inspired in the presence of creative work. And we all struggle to communicate, to express what we mean, how we think, who we are and what we feel.

If my readers can get a little bit better in any of these areas, I consider my work here worthwhile.

From time to time, the discussion may seem to veer off path a little bit. But I assure you it will still belong to the theme, just in a broader perspective. For example, productivity isn’t confined in a personal space – many management tasks in a corporate setting involve making teamwork more productive. So Peter Drucker’s type preaches are fair game here too.

Similarly, examples of creativity at times may seem techy rather than artsy (which is what many of us think when we hear the word “creative”), but they no less belong in the realm. When Steve Jobs demanded that rectangular windows in the early-day Macintosh have round edges, it was impossibly problematic, because the task involves taking a square root, which the Macintosh back in those days didn’t support. (It performed poorly even at multiplication and division, let alone taking a square root.) Apple’s engineers eventually divined a superfast way of taking a square root of a number using only addition and subtraction, and RoundRects was born! That was creative and genius!

Expression has most to do with bringing what’s in your head out to the real world to create impact. It may do with uttered voice in public, but it may also do with lines on a piece of paper and computer graphics rendered 3D. It’s a broad theme in fact; anything to do with connecting what’s in your head with what other people can see, hear or read is fair game.

And finally, the three topics are all very much related. As Dawson Trotman, the founder of the Navigators, said, “Thoughts disentangle themselves when they pass through the lips and fingertips.”

Also published on Medium.