Sometimes Seth Godin makes it easy for me to do the newsletter. There’s a pithy post that says everything I want to say. So, to the kids I coach, this is the best writing advice I could give you! (Everything below the break is Seth, (emphases mine)) Decorating a car with bling, mudflaps and an airhorn is a form of signalling. You can show your peers that you have the resources to waste on superfluous adornments. ...
From the Writing Routines1 pdf that is available on signing up to their mailing list… “If I had a nickel for every person who ever told me he/she wanted to become a writer but “didn’t have time to read,” I could buy myself a pretty good steak dinner. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” — Stephen King, On Writing ...
Go see how large your vocabulary is! And don’t cheat! At least the first time :) Click here to take the test. This is me1. Subscribe to the newsletter already, will ya? Ok, I cheated. The original one was 40,000 so i took it again :P ↩︎
Shane Parrish’s highlights from this gem of a Ted Talk by Kahthryn Schulz. … The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is that we just assume they are ignorant. You know, they don’t have access to the same information we do and when we generously share that information with them, they are going to see the light and come on over to our team. When that doesn’t work. When it turns out those people have all the same information and they still don’t agree with us we move onto a second assumption. They’re idiots. They have all the right pieces of the puzzle and they are too moronic to put them together. ...
From a Ryan Holiday post on journalling, “I don’t journal to “be productive.” I don’t do it to find great ideas, or to put down prose I can later publish. The pages aren’t intended for anyone but me. Morning pages are, as author Julia Cameron puts it, “spiritual windshield wipers.” It’s the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found. To quote her further…: ‘Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.’” ...
From What Does Immersing Yourself in a Book Do to Your Brain? … Reading allows us to try on, for a few moments, what it truly means to be another person, with all the similar and sometimes vastly different emotions and struggles that govern others’ lives. The reading circuitry is elaborated by such simulations; so also our daily lives, and so also the lives of those who would lead others. The novelist Jane Smiley worries that it is just this dimension in fiction that is most threatened by our culture: “My guess is that mere technology will not kill the novel. . . . But novels can be sidelined. . . . When that happens, our society will be brutalized and coarsened by people . . . who have no way of understanding us or each other.” It is a chilling reminder of how important the life of reading is for human beings if we are to form an ever more realized democratic society for everyone. ...