Category: VOCATION

  • Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either.

    —Mike Jeffries, Former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch

  • And here’s David McCullough:

    There’s an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing. When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know.

    START BEFORE YOU THINK YOU’RE READY

  • Quiet your thoughts and listen to your feelings instead. Decision fatigue is exhausting because it’s a side effect of living inside your thoughts. Circular thoughts are caused by the deep-seated belief that there is ONE RIGHT ANSWER. You want to know the correct course of action. Naps, good or bad? Exercise, good or bad? Food, good or bad? Booze, good or bad? Every action is a binary moral toggle.

    Feel your way forward instead. Sometimes a nap is delicious. Other times, a nap is a way to avoid exercise or work. Sometimes work is delicious. Sometimes not working is not only necessary but sublime. If you work too much when you’re really, truly not feeling it, that can slow your productivity down a lot. You rebel against your own edict.

    Yesterday, I woke up at 2 am and walked 7 miles on my treadmill desk while writing a new chapter of my book. I took at nap at 11 am. The day before that, I walked 8 miles, worked 12 hours, and finished the draft of huge chapter of my book. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to write for that long before, but it just kept coming. The week before that, I had been struggling to even look at either my treadmill or my book, but my writing (and my entire body maybe?) fell into a hallucinatory wormhole and I went with it.

    ASK MOLLY | Glory – Maybe you want some for yourself.

  • it’s easy for a depressed person to look like he’s not working when just lying in bed can feel like work for him.

    ASK MOLLY | Hungry!

  • In your life, you will be evaluated on your output. Your boss will evaluate you on your output. If you’re a writer like me, the audience will evaluate you on your output.

    But your input is just as important. If you don’t have good input, you cannot maintain good output.

    The problem is no one manages your input. The boss never cares about your input. The boss doesn’t care about what books you read. Your boss doesn’t ask you what newspapers you read. The boss doesn’t ask you what movies you saw or what TV shows or what ideas you consume.

    But I know for a fact I could not do what I do if I was not zealous in managing high-quality inputs into my mind every day of my life. That’s why I spend maybe two hours a day writing. I’m a writer. I spend two hours a day writing, but I spend three to four hours a day reading and two to three hours a day listening to music.

    People think that that’s creating a problem in my schedule, but in fact, I say, “No, no, this is the reason why I’m able to do this. Because I have constant good-quality input.” That is the only reason why I can maintain the output.

    —Ted Gioia
    Your output depends on your input

  • I tend not to think of myself as a writer primarily. It’s something that I do from time to time—well, I hate writing. I hate, hate, hate writing. The only thing I enjoy about the writing process is being done with it.

    Brandy Jensen, On writing, giving advice, and understanding yourself

  • Where do you do most of your writing? Do you have a space in your home?

    Yeah. There’s a room that would be too cruel to be anyone’s bedroom, but it’s the perfect size for a desk. I’m a ridiculously self-disciplined person, so I’m not tempted to do other things. I actually get dressed to go to work every day—that makes me feel like I’m getting ready to work—and then I don’t leave the house all day.

    Myla Goldberg on inviting criticism, redefining success, and how parenting enhances your art

  • As the British philosopher Bertrand Russell put it in The Conquest of Happiness (1930):

    A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

    In 1918, Russell spent four and a half months in Brixton prison for ‘pacifist propaganda’, but found the bare conditions congenial and conducive to creativity:

    I found prison in many ways quite agreeable … I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy … and began the work for Analysis of Mind … One time, when I was reading Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, I laughed so loud that the warder came round to stop me, saying I must remember that prison was a place of punishment.

    Boredom is but a window to a sunny day beyond the gloom

  • What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?

    —Elizabeth Gilbert

  • “Yes, I have shattered your projects, I have annihilated your pride. Nobody needs you, you live without self-contentment, you are before me like a lamp which shines for the satisfaction of nobody, – you are ‘without any purpose.’ But you are my love and my glory, I placed my delight in you, you are the portion reserved to me, so well preserved that you are wanted by nobody else, and that you do not even think of being useful, you are my purest reflection because you have become the saints you did not want to become.”

    (L. Evely)