You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality. How so? Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come. All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration. The artist learns what to leave out. His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go. The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.
Ray Bradbury Goethe had now come to the conclusion that all forms of human knowledge are manifestations of the same life force he had intuited in his near-death experience as a young man. The problem with most people, he felt, is that they build artificial walls around subjects and ideas. The real thinker sees the connections, grasps the essence of the life force operating in every individual instance. Why should any individual stop at poetry, or find art unrelated to science, or narrow his or her intellectual interests? The mind was designed to connect things, like a loom that knits together all of the threads of a fabric. If life exists as an organic whole and cannot be separated into parts without losing a sense of the whole, then thinking should make itself equal to the whole.
A few months later, he wrote his friend, the great linguist and educator Wilhelm von Humboldt, the following: “The human organs, by means of practice, training, reflection, success or failure, furtherance or resistance…learn to make the necessary connections unconsciously, the acquired and the intuitive working hand-in-hand, so that a unison results which is the world’s wonder…The world is ruled by bewildered theories of bewildering operations; and nothing is to me more important than, so far as is possible, to turn to the best account what is in me and persists in me, and keep a firm hand upon my idiosyncrasies.” These would be the last words he would write. Within a few days he was dead, at the age of eighty-three. Mastery by Robert Greene He left me where he found me: the balcony of my mother’s apartment with the smell of adobo wafting in from the windows above, my sneakered feet dangling off the edge. His cape fluttered in the breeze and disappeared over the apartment building across the street, its jagged hem just barely missing a satellite dish. Read more from the superhero breakup What is a professional, anyway? A professional is someone who can keep working at a high level of effort and ethics, no matter what is going on—for good or ill—around him or inside him. A professional shows up every day. A professional plays hurt. A professional takes neither success nor failure personally. In the end, for me, it comes down to the work itself. A pro gets younger and more innocent as he or she ascends through the levels. It’s a paradox.
You have to keep the sense of wonder. You have to or you can’t keep going. Any other motivation will burn you out. You develop a practice, and the practice gets simpler and less self-oriented over time. We rise through the levels of professionalism by a process of surrender. We surrender to our gift, whatever that may be. Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series) by Jocelyn K. Glei I once heard a Nobel Prize-winning scientist talk about randomness, and something he said has stuck with me: What is randomness? he asked. The chances of something specifically happening at a certain time and place are astronomical, and yet every second of every day is filled with these unlikely events. You drop a dime on the floor. It rolls in a spiral, then twirls to a standstill. What are the odds that could happen exactly the same way again? Millions, maybe trillions, to one. And yet it happened as naturally as if there were no odds against it. Every event in our lives happens as if there were no odds against it. The scientist argued that randomness does not exist. We have operational definitions, he asserted, definitions that work for a certain series of circumstances and conditions, but we don’t have an absolute definition that works in all cases.
20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them by Ronald B Tobias Start Before You’re Ready Don’t prepare. Begin.
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Begin it now. A Research Diet Before we begin, you wanna do research? Uh-unh. I’m putting you on a diet. You’re allowed to read three books on your subject. No more. No underlining, no highlighting, no thinking or talking about the documents later. Let the ideas percolate. Let the unconscious do its work. Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work. Some years ago I had lunch at Joe Allen’s in Manhattan with my mentor (though he would cringe at that word), the writer and documentary maker Norm Stahl. He was making some notes on a pad of yellow, legal-size foolscap paper. He told me something that has saved my bacon more times than I can count: Steve, God made a single sheet of yellow foolscap exactly the right length to hold the outline of an entire novel. What did Norm mean by that? He meant don’t overthink. Don’t overprepare. Don’t let research become Resistance. Don’t spend six months compiling a thousand-page tome detailing the emotional matrix and family history of every character in your book. Outline it fast. Now. On instinct. Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page. Do the Work by Steven Pressfield What did you do to make money after you went broke? –@ScottEPowers
I did several things: DOWNSIZED. I had to sell my house. I severely downsized. I went from a 4,500 square foot penthouse to a 1,400 square foot house 70 miles north and I cut my expenses by 75%. I HAD TO GET IN SHAPE. I worked out every day, I emotionally stopped dealing with people who were dragging me down, I made lists of ideas every day, and I either meditated or read from various spiritual or inspirational texts each day. I knew it was going to be a tough battle to climb back up so I did everything I could to prepare. IMMEDIATELY STARTED WRITING ABOUT FINANCE TO GENERATE INCOME. Within a few months I had a book deal and I was writing for TheStreet.com and The Financial Times. Back then it was still possible to make money by writing. I was also day-trading and doing well back then (2002-05). I don’t think day trading is practical now but it was then. I STARTED TRADING FOR HEDGE FUNDS then I started helping people sell their companies, then I started a fund of hedge funds. One day at the time, as the ideas I wrote began to flourish I got back into the game. I STARTED A COMPANY: STOCKPICKR.COM http://bit.ly/qV3Q5E which I sold to TheStreet.com. There was a six year period where nobody was paying my salary and I had to hustle for every dollar. But that proved to me that no matter how bad the economy gets, if you’re the one eyed man (the optimist) in the land of the blind (the pessimists) then you will find the ways to make money even if we are in a Depression. It might be your own creativity and flexibility that wants to get out and help you on your next idea. That creativity is a sleeping monster and it never gets smaller if you keep feeding it, nurturing it, loving it, taking care of it. Persistence in developing that creativity will make you better at execution, better at idea generation, and more optimistic (simply because over time you will be more confident that you can always awaken it). Creativity becomes your loving friend instead of your enemy. And optimism, creativity, and persistence are all close siblings that want to play together as much as possible. I also always made sure I delivered at least one extra feature that the company didn’t ask for. When you make other people make money, then you will make money. Then you repeat that and it’s a business. Faq Me by James Altucher Your “purpose“ in life.
I don’t like the word purpose. It implies that somewhere in the future I will find something that will make me happy, and that until then, I will be unhappy. People fool themselves into thinking that the currency of unhappiness will buy them happiness. That we have to “pay our dues,” go on some sort of ride, and then get dropped off at a big location called our “purpose,” where now we can be happy. It doesn’t work that way Choose Yourself! by James Altucher There are four questions you might ask before starting any new venture:
Now, if you want to create it, then in the known (Prediction-based) world, it can make sense to spend time and effort on questions one, two, and three. But in the unknowable world, where you can’t predict the future, the answers to the first three questions are all the same: “There is no way of telling.” You won’t know until you actually try. You can do all the market research you want, ask everyone what they think about your idea, or speculate endlessly. But the only way to truly discover if there is gold at the end of the rainbow is to take an action and see what happens. Until you act, you won’t know. However, none of that matters until—and unless—you answer the fourth question: do I want to do it? There is simply no way you are going to give the venture your full effort if your heart isn’t in it at least to some degree. Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future by Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer A very simple test was done by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram. He took ten students and sent them on the New York City subway system. They went on subways and walked up to all sorts of people who were sitting down: young, old, black, white, female, male, pregnant, etc. To each seated passenger they said, “Can I have your seat?” Seventy percent of the people gave up their seats.
Two interesting things: one, that the percentage of people who got up was so high. They were simply being asked to get up and they did as they were told. Interesting thing is how reluctant the students were to even do the experiment. To ask people for their seats went against everything they had ever been taught. This is obviously an extreme. But it points out how hard it is for us to do things for ourselves unless we are given some implicit permission. Choose Yourself! by James Altucher |
Click to set custom HTML
Categories
All
Disclosure of Material Connection:
Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” |