Articles by: Hanna Brooks Olsen

[caption id="attachment_6780" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Flickr[/caption] In school, you got in trouble for copying the work of others. As a college student, you may have worried that the RIAA would show up at your house if you pirated too much music from LimeWire.

The ubiquity of cell phones may have made the self-portrait a point of mockery, but it's not exactly a new medium. Photographers and regular folks have been setting up cameras with timers or posing in front of mirrors since the birth of the camera.

With the frequency that your scissors go missing, you'd think they'd become sentient and grown legs. And finding the right color of yarn (or thread, or paper, or ink) in fewer than 10 minutes?

[caption id="attachment_6634" align="alignnone" width="620"] Image via Flickr[/caption] CreativeLive CEO Chase Jarvis will quickly tell you: He's a great quitter.   He's quit all kinds of things, from various sports to med school.

[caption id="attachment_6560" align="alignnone" width="620"] By Sonja Langford[/caption] It's debatable whether or not the eight-hour workday works for everyone – or even anyone – mostly because it's darn near impossible to plop down in front of a computer and just hit the productivity switch. For freelancers, it can be even more challenging, as the distractions of a home office, the internet, or, you know, a life, begin to slowly eat away at the time when you should be working.

This week, NPR reported on a study that found that the human brain, regardless of a person's perceived ability to keep a beat, can still keep time. The findings further underscored a long-running theory that music truly is a universal human language, as old as time and as thoroughly rooted in our brains as the need to breathe.

[caption id="attachment_6499" align="alignnone" width="620"] Image via Flickr[/caption] Being a creative -- in whatever sense you may be, even if you choose not to use the adjective as a noun -- is deeply satisfying. Study after study has shown that job satisfaction and happiness among creatives tends to skew high, and that, conversely, creativity leads to happiness.

[caption id="attachment_6443" align="alignnone" width="620"] Image via the State Library of Queensland[/caption] Let's all take a moment to reflect on the proud legacy of the sewing machine. Like clothes, jewelry, and clunky kitchen appliances, sewing machines are one of those things that most of us get handed down from a relative.