Ryan Holiday, writes about a question, he purports will change your reading life. And this was somehow surprising to me, because as a bookworm, I have been slipping this question (or a variant of it) into casual conversations with folks all my life. If I need my reading queue to be always full, I need to always be closing :) And since it has helped me so much, it’s only fair, I share it with you :) ...
This week’s message is stolen, lock stock and barrel from an old Austin Kleon post. I’ve often wanted to riff off this message, ever since I read it in his book and it changed my life. But it is perfect and short as it is. Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb. They want the job title without the work. ...
This is a short, punch-to-the-gut Seth post. So I am just stealing it wholesale, for you and me. (mostly for me :)) When you bought your first smartphone, did you know you would spend more than 1,000 hours a year looking at it? Months later, can you remember how you spent those hours? When you upgraded to a new smartphone, so you could spend more hours on it, did you think about how you had spent so much of your ‘free’ time the year before? ...
I found this image on Austin Kleon’s blog a few days ago, and it set me to thinking about these newsletters of mine. I would love to think of them, the same way. They are free, but definitely not cheap :) Not to toot my own horn, but for all their recent brevity, it still is a process that involves a lot of reading, and thinking and curating and writing. (and a whole lot of slogging) ...
image courtesy, Suzy Hazelwood Austin Kleon, quoting Octavia Butler on reading more than a book at a time. I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another. ...
A Life in Parts, Bryan Cranston fun read when a working actor, tells their story, it’s always a treat. when a working actor, who struck it big, tells their story, it’s a roller coaster :) Bryan has fun with the book; there are tales that appear so real, until he yanks the rug, telling you it wasn’t. And there are passages that are unbelievable, but true. Loved this passage in the book … ...