Sampling the web for interestingness
You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a […]
This is neat. The calendar from 1895 and 2019 share the same dates. Mind the prescient quote. Everything comes in circles…The old wheel turns and the same spoke comes up. It has all been done before and will be again… Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear
If we can see the path ahead laid out for us, there is a good chance it is not our path; it is probably someone else’s we have substituted for our own. David Whyte, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America image via giphy
Every change that is made not only involves learning something new, but also usually surrendering something else that is familiar and comfortable. Jeffrey A. Kottler, Change: What Really Leads to Lasting Personal Transformation
Music is liquid architecture, Architecture is frozen music. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Anxiety is the price we pay for an ability to imagine the future. That’s what anxiety is, an imagination of a future that hasn’t happened yet, but that you are concerned with, worried about, dreading, and so on.” Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety art by @aishwaryasadasivan
Illustrator and author of The Shape of Ideas Grant Snider, dropped a new comic for New York Times books that outlines the pains of writer’s block using the metaphor of a city block itself. I’ve written extensively on the myth of a writer’s block here before. And it’s just that, a myth. No matter what fictitious […]
“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” Thomas Edison
“Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.” Meister Eckhart
More often than not we aim for freedom from constraint. No one likes to be nailed down to a particular way of doing things. But on some occasions, constraints can be freeing. For one, deadlines are great motivators. We’d never get anything done without any pressure. Writing is difficult enough — put a cap on […]
Writing a book is like telling a joke and having to wait two years to know whether or not it was funny. Alain de Botton True, books can’t be instantly graded like a Tweet. But giving a book at least two years of work enables the author to go deeper and explore the magic wand […]
Know what you write about, write about what you know; this is a golden rule to which you must adhere. To know you must study. The world is an open book in which all who run may read. Nature is one great volume the pages of which are open to the peasant as well as […]
Half-baked ideas are valuable ideas. Messy minds and messy processes generate new ways of thinking. We create through the imperfect. “A small drop of ink makes thousands, perhaps millions think,” wrote businessman and self-help book author William Clement Stone. The more ideas we have, the more we have to play with. Brainstorming is, therefore, a democratic […]
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“It is 6am and I am working. I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social obligations etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, and the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written.” Mary Oliver Who needs the muse when you’ve got a proper habit? […]