If you want to someday make money from your skills and your craft, you owe it to yourself to read this. If you have never read Lucas, you owe it to yourself to read him. Buy Cashflow for Creators! My highlighted notes from the book follow … Craft is the nuts and bolts of how you do The Thing. For a writer, it’s stuff like grammar and spelling and reading. For a glass artist, it’s not mixing different COEs or—at the highest levels—how to mix different COEs....
Despite financial troubles there’s a sense in which my childhood was immensely privileged — a pauper in the material world, I was a sultan in the world of ideas. — Erik Hoel I started by wanting to share that quote and link on my microblog and then my thoughts turned into a blog post sized comment. I decided to post it here too, then. That quote describes my life to a T, even now....
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. “Forget about being a Writer,” says novelist Ann Packer....
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....
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....
The fastest way to raise your level of performance: Cut your number of commitments in half. — via James Clear’s latest 3–2–1 missive Jack Butcher puts it even more eloquently … Do! P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these to your friends and get them to subscribe! P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.
My brain is too scattered, so here are a few scattered thoughts on writing and why I write. On the why? Writing, to me, is cathartic exercise. It acts like a pressure release valve. It makes me calmer. The very act of writing clarifies my thoughts, and helps sharpen my mind. It gives me distance from my thoughts, makes me more objective. It helps me learn better. As I was learning Maths last year, the teacher constantly reminded me that learning, true learing and understanding, comes from written practice....
I’ve, seen things, you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire, off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams, glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those, moments, will be lost, in time, like, tears, in rain. Time, to die. Blade Runner was the first movie I saw, that had a morally ambigous ‘hero’. And the villain is not bad? And he saves the hero? This was the first movie that made me look at the world in shades of grey, in shades of acceptance....
“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” — Charlie Munger That quote opens Shane’s post on the work required to hold an opinion, which remains one of the mental models I use most often. Which is why I had my ears and my mind open, when Shane began one of his latest posts with,...