Categories
Life & Philosophy

Unique in your perversity

via giphy

You may be unique in your perversity, always bucking trends and wanting to know more than what’s at face value.

The outlier refuses to live on the whims of an algorithm and let group think colonize parts of their mind.

Interesting people always dig deeper, going above and beyond the most comprehensive snapshots of reality.

Making a plethora of connections, the anomaly also finds the time and space to air out the neurons.

To think different produces a mark for decades. So you keep evolving, breaking experiences into pieces.

Categories
Life & Philosophy

Trying too hard to be happy

Everyone’s out there chasing Mr. Smiley. But “happiness must happen,” wrote Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, “and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”

The quest for happiness produces the exact opposite of its intention: unhappiness. Keep swimming in the sea of joy, and we’ll cease to be so. The extra effort makes one miserable.

We try too hard to be happy when everything we want is on the other side of fear. What we want is to be more vulnerable. Everything in life that matters requires risk.

Happy elephant, Trying too hard to be happy?
via welcometonature/twitter

Dancing with the unknown and thinking unhappy thoughts is at the heart of finding satisfaction.

The storm never ends, the faster we accept that, the quicker we can land contentment which is happy just being itself.

Categories
Books Writing

‘Good work only comes through revision’

After a lifetime of hounding authors for advice, I’ve heard three truths from every mouth: (1) Writing is painful— it’s ‘fun’ only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality.”

THE ART OF MEMOIR BY MARY KARR
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Books Productivity & Work Quotes Writing

‘The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it’

the war of art steven pressfield

“Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. The more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That’s why we feel so much resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no resistance.”

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
Categories
Books Quotes Writing

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

via twitter

“Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows. Waiting rooms were made for books—of course! But so are theater lobbies before the show, long and boring checkout lines, and everyone’s favorite, the john. You can even read while you’re driving, thanks to the audiobook revolution. Of the books I read each year, anywhere from six to a dozen are on tape. As for all the wonderful radio you will be missing, come on—how many times can you listen to Deep Purple sing “Highway Star”?

Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Categories
Life & Philosophy

Floating into thin air

gif by tverd/giphy

There’s always something jerking at the brain, wooing it into the warp of distraction.

So if we can just concentrate the mind and wield the paintbrush, maybe we could uncover the pleasure of presence.

There’s something about being in the moment with all our flesh that makes realization realizable.

Instead of casting a wide net into the river, we’re the ones being fished back into reality.

The brain does the walking while the feet adhere. We stroll into our best thoughts like a tourist with fresh eyes.

The ground is near because we’re floating in the air rather than swimming in the sea of uncertainty.