Syntopica

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. Painters need to understand that light and pigments blend colors very differently, how to prep and clean a canvas, and so on. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...