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
Category: VOCATION
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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) -
“Different is better than better.”
—Sally
“When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.”
—James Clear
“Don’t seek to be the best. Seek to be the only.”
—Kevin Kelly
“They’re not the best at what they do—they’re the only ones that do what they do.”
—Bill Graham -
Don’t ask yourself, “What am I better at?”
Ask, “How am I different?”
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“I want to live a life that doesn’t require an alarm clock—one that I can’t wait to wake up and start living each day.”
—Joshua Becker, A Life Worth Waking Up For
SO GOOD QUOTES 