50 Principles of Unknown Arts
A compass for creative builders navigating the frontier of technology and creativity.
Welcome to Unknown Arts, where creative builders navigate new possibilities. Ready to explore uncharted territory? Join me on the journey!
I've been quiet the past couple of weeks as I started a new job, and honestly, it's given me some much-needed space to reflect. During this pause, I found myself thinking about the threads that run through my work on Unknown Arts.
One major current has been exploring creative principles: approaches that have proven useful across disciplines, both in my career and in my personal creative pursuits. While Unknown Arts blends many areas – emerging tech, design, philosophy, community, personal growth – these creative principles are a foundational undercurrent.
After publishing 173 articles over the last three years, I realized I should start to centralize these recurring ideas from my archive to make them more accessible to everyone who discovers my work. So here's a first attempt at gathering them into one place.
Think of this as a field guide of sorts, not a rigid manifesto. It’s 50 ideas I've tested and found valuable in my life while building in this rapidly changing world. Some will resonate with you immediately, others might make more sense later, and a few might not fit your journey at all – and that's perfectly fine. This collection is partly for you, partly for me, and hopefully helpful for both of us as we navigate the unknown together.
I’ve linked to my original riff on the concept when applicable.
Creation & Output
Be prolific–quantity forges the path to quality. Creative success is a numbers game. More attempts dramatically increase your odds of breakthrough.
Create daily, even briefly. Fifteen minutes of consistent practice outperforms sporadic binges and waiting for inspiration.
Make first, understand later. The best inventions often precede comprehension. Build to discover.
Published beats perfect. Completion is currency in the creative economy. Ship work that's "done for now." The beauty of digital mediums is you can always update it later or ship another version.
Ideas need air to breathe. Thoughts trapped in your head can't grow. Get them into tangible form where you can review them, get meaningful feedback from others, and allow the idea to evolve.
Explore the edges first. The extremes inform the mean. If you aim for average you'll get average work. Aiming for the edges reveal insights that help you move the average forward.
Train your creativity like an athlete. Structure your work in cycles of intensity, performance, and recovery like an athlete. This is how to spur growth instead of stagnancy.
Mindset & Approach
Embrace the taste gap. The disconnect between your vision and current abilities is a sign of potential. Accept its inevitability and move forward.
Follow the fear. When something feels a little scary or uncomfortable, you're likely onto something valuable.
Be willing to be a nobody. To create something truly your own you will have to let go of status and security for an undetermined amount of time. This is part of the test.
Craft your reality distortion field. Unwavering belief in your idea creates the environment where impossible things happen.
Curation is creation. Selection and arrangement create meaning and value in a world of abundant information.
Some work is yours and yours alone. Certain ideas won't manifest unless you personally bring them into being. It's your responsibility to take the lead.
Cross boundaries, find intersections. Your most unique value comes from combining disciplines and ideas others keep separate.
Create from a place of love. Work born from genuine affection connects deeper than cynical execution. It may not provoke immediate response, but people are finely attuned to gravitate toward genuine admiration.
Talent is just one ingredient. It is the starting place. Required, but insufficient for achieving creative impact.
Be radically pragmatic. Too radical leads to not connecting. Too pragmatic leads to zero progress. Hit the sweet spot between.
Accept the consequences of being yourself. Being true to yourself comes with trade-offs, but the benefits of authenticity outweigh the costs.
Process & Practice
Find the game. Notice patterns, elevate the interesting ones, and make them special through repetition. This becomes a game for you and your audience.
Commit to the bit. Strong choices create clarity. Half-measures undermine both the work and audience trust.
Balance execution and exploration. Today's creative environment skews toward constant execution, but taking time to explore is essential for filling your cup with ideas worth executing.
Design an environment where willpower doesn't matter. Make creating easier than procrastinating by designing your space for the work you do. This looks different for everyone, but should feel great to you.
Use constraints as fuel. Self-imposed limitations force creative solutions that unlimited options never produce.
Batch similar tasks. Group related activities to preserve mental energy and maintain creative momentum.
Track your wins, however small. Visual evidence of progress builds motivation. What's celebrated multiplies.
Media, AI & Technology
Design for serendipity. Create systems that allow for unexpected connections and fortunate accidents rather than just predictable outcomes.
Guide rather than control. With generative systems, focus on intuitive steering rather than perfect understanding.
Partner with AI, don't just use it. Treat AI as a creative collaborator rather than a mere tool. The best outputs emerge from the human-machine dance.
All media Is multimedia. AI will push your ideas across formats. Design with this fluidity in mind.
Earn the right to abstract. Like Picasso's bull, start with more direct representation before distilling to the essence.
Build once, scale infinitely. Create assets with zero marginal cost of reproduction to reap the biggest rewards in the modern economy.
Great ideas are not forced, they emerge. Resonance is fundamentally unpredictable. Your goal is not to create great work, but rather to create the conditions for great work to emerge.
Growth & Learning
Be a skill surfer. Ride the wave of curiosity with the most momentum for you right now.
Seek productive discomfort. Growth happens just beyond your current abilities. Visit that edge regularly.
Learn through making. Experiential knowledge sticks while theoretical understanding often fades.
Step out before you're ready. Support teammates when they need you, even when you feel unprepared. If you wait until you're fully "ready" you'll never begin.
Cultivate Scenius. Individual genius emerges from collective creativity. Find or build the scene where your work can flourish.
Gather knowledge, trust your gut. Cast a wide net and collect info from diverse sources, then let your subconscious connect the dots and drive you forward.
Rejection reveals new paths. When one door closes, look for the others that open. A life path is not binary. It’s a series of branching possibilities.
What you're meant to do is often not what you think you should do. Many people will pitch you on potential paths, but be careful not to fool yourself. Knowing and accepting what you’re meant to do can be deceptively hard.
Surround yourself with symbols. Fill your life with meaningful objects that reinforce your identity and trigger positive states of mind. Artifacts that reflect your journey and aspirations, not just aesthetic choices.
Impact & Purpose
Master soft power. Creative skills are a potent form of influence in any environment. If you can't command, create.
Improvise, processize, productize. Balance all three approaches to find and deliver the most effective product solutions.
Find the SMIT. Every creation needs one Single Most Important Thing. Clarity trumps comprehensiveness.
Balance the advanced with the acceptable. The Most Advanced Yet Acceptable (MAYA) design pushes boundaries appropriately and makes an impact.
Aim for "best in the world, bar none." Set aspirations beyond reasonable to elevate your trajectory, even if you miss the mark.
Join the scalable class. The Internet provides opportunities to detach your income from your time and transcend traditional limits on creative impact. The path isn't easy, but it offers unprecedented freedom and rewards at a global scale.
Have faith and act on it. All great creators go through extended periods of doubt. It takes patience and faith to believe that the next good idea will arrive. But sooner or later, the next idea always arrives through persistent action.
You can do all things, but not at once. Lack of focus kills creative progress. You have time to go deep. You can dedicate years at a time to a single focus and still have plenty of time to explore all your curiosities before you leave this world.
Set your mind to Unknown Arts. Et ignotas animum dimmittit in artes–the namesake of this publication. You flourish by applying your creativity in the pursuit of the unknown. Build your way forward.
Putting this collection together has been revealing. Ideas that started as feelings have become clearer through the practice of writing about them repeatedly. What was once fuzzy intuition has gradually sharpened into something I can articulate and share. But these principles aren’t set in stone, I expect they’ll evolve as I do, capturing and refining what’s useful to me at the time.
Unknown Arts exists for the explorers, the builders, the folks who see possibilities where others see dead ends. It's for people who understand that the frontier is like the horizon – it’s never really reached – but that that doesn’t mean it’s not worth sailing toward.
So set your mind to Unknown Arts and build your way forward. It’s time to put your hands in the clay and sculpt a life that's truly yours.
See you next time,
Patrick
