MURAKAMI
I’m a hard worker. I concentrate on my work very hard. So, you know, it’s easy. And I don’t do anything but write my fiction when I write.
INTERVIEWER
How is your typical workday structured?
MURAKAMI
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.
Haruki Murakami Interview - Paris Review
Pursue a life of focused creative work.
That is the goal for all of us, and the tools have never been better, easier, or less expensive than right this minute.
Dream. Write. Do. Now.
"The notion that the most outlandish thoughts could pay for your existence,” says Grant Morrison. “The most bizarre thoughts you may have had in 1994 on an Ecstasy tab can turn into money, which turns into houses, which turns into cat food. It’s the Yukon in our brain, it’s a gold rush, it’s all sitting there, and it’s worth money."
Our dreams and thoughts can change things, they can change the world but we need to do more than think them; our creative acts can do anything, and they are very powerful, and the oddest thought can change your life and others.
We need to chose to be active over passive. I kept creating web site after web site, until I realized that what I really wanted was to create.
Writing is not passive, not when done right.
Writing is getting in the trenches of what it means to alive, and it can show and deliver and high light all the possibilities thatit means to be human.
Say yes more than you say no.
Writing is a talent and a skill, but all the skill in the world doesn't mean anything if you have nothing to say or give.
Interesting lives leads to interesting creative acts when coupled with skill, practice, and discipline.
Start writing.
D
You can’t read your way to expertise. I have tried.
You have to do.
People who get things accomplished choose to work on things more consistently and with more ficus than average people.
They systematically work, making what they want to accomplish a series of habits to repeat.
So here is what I want you to do:
1. Today, I want you to pick one thing that you really want to do.
2. In the next 24 hours, I want you to do one thing to make that happen. Make it simple and short, 10 to 15 minutes to do. Mark on a calendar.
3. Then the following day do that one thing again. Mark it on the calendar.
4. Continue for 7 days and then calculate what you have done. How much did you get done in one day? Take that and multiply by 365, and that is what you will have done in a year.
Consistency is powerful. It creates productivity.
Woody Allen states “If you work only three to five hours a day you become very productive. It’s the steadiness of it that counts. Getting to the typewriter every day is what makes productivity.”
It takes Woody Allen a month to write a comedy and three months to write a drama so at three to five hours a day it shows me he writes every day, he’s consistent, and he doesn’t waste time.
D
John von Neumann’s says it the best in the following quote, “The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models..”
My writing is basically model-building.T hough in my blog I don’t use mathematics, my approach is basically the same one as explained in the above quote. Writing allows you to see all the potential things you can do, or see, or create. Once you have many ideas, and you have thought of and written through the various ideas or models, then you do.
- Analyze than do and sometimes it is better to do than to think. You can over analyze.
- Do the smallest easiest thing.
I learned this only because of all my self-experimentation. I started doing self-experimentation because of better to do than to think.
Actions matter. D PS. This is the first post from my phone. Basically a test, and if it works, get ready.
Sometimes you need to take something apart to make it better, either literally of figureitively.
Writing notes over and over, taking my ideas and new concepts and breaking them down, I realize I am like Philip Glass, in his music, in that reptition there is power.
Taking pieces of thought, taking your thought patterns, taking how you see the world, and then writing pieces down and repeating, and changing elements only slighty, pushing all the possibilities, until you discover the power of the idea, and you learn how slight changes of thought can bring large changes to your life and your concepts.
Writing can methodically change how you think, so that you can change how you think. When you understand the concepts of neural plasticity, you know that your brain is not fixed in time, that it can change and will change, and you can control that change.
Write down all the possible variants of an idea.
Do no editing.
Truly explore ideas and concepts, slightly change it each time, and bring the power of repitition to the process, so that you csn start picking what ideas you like, and then reinforce those ideas that you want to internalize.
You write about what you want to be, how you want to live, write about what about what you want to become and then explore what it would be like, how it would be to live that way, what you would see, what you would do, how you would be, write until reality starts to match the idea.
Writing activates your mind. It is a visualiztion technique that also uses the physical.
I like literature because it shows all the possiblities of what a person can be, all the ways to be human, and writing lets you do the same thing.
It allows you to see all the possible variations of you, and to see all the possiblity in you. It lets you think and feel and act your way to what you can be.
See what you truly think, because most of us do not know ourselves, and we have over time built layer upon layer of persona, which we need to strip away until pure and then rebuild those aspects of persona we choose to be.
We build our future selves.
"As Thoreau famously sead, it doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love." — Pico Iyer
"Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going." — Hunter S. Thompson ( The Rum Diary)
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