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....
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....
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.
Ryan Holiday writes about 11 expressions that you will help you with life. I have always used Memento Mori and Amor Fati. This list has several more! Festina Lente Carpe Diem Fac, si facis Quidvis recte factum quamvis humile praeclarum Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful) Per Angusta Ad Augusta Amor fati Fatum Ingenium Est Semper Anticus Vivere Militare Est Memento Mori Go on, read about what they mean and how they can change you....
via Vishal Khandelwal Vishal has a lovely article, on the shortness of life, over at Safal Niveshak. That is where I stole the beautiful picture above from. (you can click the pic for a larger version.) “So you must match time’s swiftness with your speed in using it, and you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow.” —Seneca “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do....
In the vein of the old zen koan about enlightenment or Seth’s drip by drip approach to affecting change in the world, James Clear offers a simple 3 step process to becoming a writer (or painter, or programmer, or guitarist, weight loss person, or gymnast.) Publish on a schedule. Consistency develops ability. Share your writing publicly. Writing is a magnet. It attracts like-minded people. Write about what fascinates you. You don’t need to be an expert....
In the run up to exams in a few months, my life has turned super busy again. So once again, I turn to wiser people and the things that inspire me, to keep my writing habit going :) Let’s start with Ryan Holiday. In his post, Ryan Holiday Picks 20 Books to Help You Live Better in 2020, he concludes with a sage paragraph on the benefits of re reading books that matter....
Want to know what I was up to, with my reading last year? The whole big list is here. I read in November and December too, but some books you just … cannot :) via the ever creative, Tom Gauld If you want to see the books I read over and over again, every single year, here is my Lindy list. I hope to learn more, enjoy more, read more this year....