Posts by Hillary
What To Do If You Are Stuck in the Middle of a Project
Middles are tough. It’s no accident that Dante began The Inferno, his allegorical journey through Hell, thusly: Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Or that Christian, the pilgrim in John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, encounters the bog called the…
Read MoreGuest Post: Working Absurd Hours Is Not A Badge Of Honor
The below article by digital marketing guru Adam Singer packs a ton of wisdom into a few paragraphs, and is reprinted with kind permission. Adam’s free newsletter The Future Buzz provides terrific advice on digital marketing, time management, and other success skills, and I urge you to subscribe. – Hillary My entire career I’ve worked…
Read More“Her Face Went From Scowl to Peace”: 7 Secrets of the Prolific Helps Lifelong Procrastinator and Her 12-Year-Old Daughter
From the mailbag: I just wanted to thank you for putting together this comprehensive book. I’ve suffered from writers block/perfectionism my whole life, and once in a while I break through, but then get bogged down again. Your book confirmed some of the core discoveries I made overcoming my blocks, but has done so much…
Read MoreIra Glass on Developing Your Creative Skill: Go for Quantity, Not Quality
The below 2 minute video of Ira Glass explaining how the secret to artistic quality is to do a lot of art is well worth your time. Bayles and Orland make the same point in their terrific book Art & Fear. They tell a (true, I believe) story of two pottery classes: One class was…
Read MoreWho Makes the Best Mentor? And Coming to Terms with My $14,500 Mentor Failure
Who makes the best mentor? According to research, it’s not the star performers: In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, for example, Jerker Denrell of the University of Oxford and Chengwei Liu of the University of Warwick counsel us to model ourselves on solid, second-tier performers, not the flashy…
Read MoreDesigner Milton Glaser’s Universe of Abundance
An important element of perfectionism is a sense of scarcity and deprivation, so this quotation from iconic graphic designer Milton Glaser offers an important antiperfectionist message: “If you perceive the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity then it will be…I…
Read MoreMargaret Atwood, Anne Enright, and Garry Kasparov, on Failure
Meditations on failure, from some leading writers. I like this quote from Margaret Atwood: Failure is just another name for much of real life: much of what we set out to accomplish ends in failure, at least in our own eyes. Who set the bar so high that most of our attempts to sail gracefully over it…
Read MoreHartford, Connecticut: Registration Now Open for 7 Secrets of the Prolific Class, Tuesday, July 2, at Mark Twain House
[please scroll down to see participant feedback from my last session at Mark Twain House] “One of the most popular writers from our 2nd Annual Writers’ weekend returns to jump-start your writing this summer.” Would you like to boost your writing productivity, finish your projects, and find more joy in your work? You can do…
Read MoreWhy You Shouldn’t Mock Beauty Pageant Contestants
[Note: I’m pretty sure none of my readers would mock a contestant, so please don’t think I’m speaking to you personally, so much as the entire Internet. – Hillary] It seems to be evolving into a seasonal pastime to mock beauty pageant contestants who garble their speeches, but here’s why you shouldn’t do it: 1)…
Read MoreMy Inner Critic is a Wise Latina
I had a really bad night’s sleep last night, even for me. At one point, I actually dreamt that I was being judged by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor! Could be worse–could have been Scalia or Alito or Thomas. So the yield of twelve+ years work helping others overcome their perfectionism is that my Inner…
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