When action is our priority, vanity falls away.
That is what journaling is about. It’s spiritual windshield wipers, as the writer Julia Cameron once put it.
He was patient because he knew that difficult things took time.
To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard. It must be our primary focus. We must set out, from the beginning, with complete and total commitment to the idea that our best chance of success starts during the creative process.
When you take away the question mark, it usually turns their headline into a lie.
Paul Graham explains, “The best way to increase a startup’s growth rate is to make the product so good people recommend it to their friends.
The economics of the internet are exploited to change public perception – and sell product.
No one is entitled to relationships only because their work is genius. Relationships have to be earned, and maintained.
We’re all just humans, doing the best we can. We’re all just trying to survive, and in the process, inch the world forward a little bit.
Every obstacle is unique to each of us. But the responses they elicit are the same: Fear. Frustration. Confusion. Helplessness. Depression. Anger.
Blogs are assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of the business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you’re at The Huffington Post or some tiny blog. Taken individually, the resulting output is obvious: bad stories, incomplete stories, wrong stories, unimportant stories.
To create something is a daring, beautiful act. The.
To borrow from Budd Schulberg’s description of a media manipulator in his classic novel The Harder They Fall, I was “indulging myself in the illusions that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch.” I no longer have those illusions.
Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, outlined when he described what happens to businesses in tumultuous times: “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.
There’s nothing to feel guilty about for being idle. It’s not reckless. It’s an investment. There is nourishment in pursuits that have no purpose – that is their purpose.
See things for what they are. Do what we can. Endure and bear what we must.
Everybody’s got a hungry heart – that’s true. But how we choose to feed that heart matters. It’s what determines the kind of person we end up being, what kind of trouble we’ll get into, and whether we’ll ever be full, whether we’ll ever really be still.
If I am not for myself who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I? – HILLEL.
We can be Edison, our factory on fire, not bemoaning our fate but enjoying the spectacular scene. And then starting the recovery effort the very next day – roaring back soon enough.
Humans are still primed to detect threats and dangers that no longer exist – think of the cold sweat when you’re stressed about money, or the fight-or-flight response that kicks in when your boss yells at you. Our safety is not truly at risk here – there is little danger that we will starve or that violence will break out – though it certainly feels that way sometimes.