Inspiration
Stephen King and Anthony Trollope on the Importance of Approaching Your Work With the Proper (Non-Grandiose) Attitude
From The 7 Secrets of the Prolific: The prolific tend to see their writing not as some holy mission but their “work, “craft,” or even “job”: Stephen King: “Don’t wait for the muse…This isn’t the Ouija board or the spirit-world we’re talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks.…
Read MoreHe Gets It!
“We must act knowing that our work will be imperfect.” Barack Obama, 2d inaugural address, January 21, 2013
Read MoreThree Great Success Tips from Ted Behr
My friend Ted Behr went to a success workshop and came back with three great tips.
Read MoreSeth Godin’s Icarus Sessions A Great Idea – and Coming to Your Town
It’s so important that you be able to stand up and say, “This is who I am and this is what is important to me, and here’s why it is important.” If you don’t you remain ashamed and isolated, which feeds procrastination. Uber marketing guru Seth Godin knows all this and is organizing a global…
Read MoreDavid Foster Wallace on Time Management
From a graduation speech he gave at Kenyon College in 2005: Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that…”Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to…
Read MoreIf No One Falls Over, We’re Having a Great Class!
One of my recent newsletters discussed a misguided essay (and now, regrettably, book) by a prominent philosophy professor on his notion of “constructive procrastination. I’m happy now to refer you to this essay, I’m With Stupid, by a writer who is not, to my knowledge, a prominent professor, but who nevertheless has figured out a…
Read MoreAll Your Work Should Be Sand Castles
The wonderful and much-missed writer and writing teacher John Gardner wrote in On Becoming A Novelist: “If children can build sand castles without getting sand-castle block, and if ministers can pray over the sick without getting holiness block, the writer who enjoys his work and takes measured pride in it should never be troubled by…
Read More“Why am I so hateful and a perfectionist?”
In a big rush this morning due to heavy teaching load, but had to post about this. Like most blogsters, I regularly check my stats to see how much traffic I have, where it’s coming from, etc. Among other things, I see the search terms people use to wind up on my site. Last night,…
Read MoreInterview with Richard Stallman
My friend Richard Stallman is the founder of the free software movement . His ideas have spawned not only the GNU/Linux operating system , but Wikipedia , Creative Commons the anti-DRM Defective by Design campaign, and other important social movements. He is a MacArthur “genius,” and arguably the world’s most successful activist, and I was…
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