If you set a goal of being better than you were yesterday, you have the chance to succeed every day. If you set the goal of being the best in the world, you have the chance to feel so overwhelmed you’ll jump in front of the nearest ice cream truck.
– Naomi Dunford @ IttyBiz
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If reading an inspiring quote about DIY creativity makes you wish someone would print it on a t-shirt, you maybe ought to go read it again.
–Merlin Mann aka hotdogsladies @ Twitter
The inspiring quote in question: “Get Excited and Make Things,” as seen in this design by Matt Jones. It’s a great spin on the Brits’ WWII slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On.”
Sadly, I would like that design on a poster.
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You need to create a tortoise enclosure so that your little tortoise mind, a little nervous creature, can look around and think “Yes, it’s safe to come out.” And to do this you need to create a kind of oasis in your life in the middle of the stress. [...] There’s two things you have to do: you have to create boundaries of space and you have to create boundaries of time. It’s as simple as that.
– John Cleese, from a talk in Belgium. This bit comes at about 6:45 minutes into the video. A lovely talk.
(via Mark Forster @ Twitter)
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When I lived in the back of my Chevy van, I had to dig my typewriter out from beneath layers of tire tools, dirty laundry, and moldering paperbacks. My truck was a nest, a hive, a hellhole on wheels whose sleeping surface I had to clear each night just to carve out a foxhole to snooze in.
The professional cannot live like that. He is on a mission. He will not tolerate disorder. He eliminates chaos from his world in order to banish it from his mind. He wants the carpet vacuumed and the threshold swept, so the Muse may enter and not soil her gown.
– Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
Great book. I wrote a full write-up on it here at the main site.
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When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can’t fire at you. (That’s what the soldiers mean when they shout "cover me." It means, "fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can’t fire at me while I run across this street, here." It works.) The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you’re not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you’re not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.
I remembered this for a long time. I noticed how almost every kind of military strategy, from air force dogfights to large scale naval maneuvers, is based on the idea of Fire and Motion. It took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit, every day.
– Joel Spolsky @ Joel on Software
If your life were magically transferred to a battlefield what would it look like? Can you see yourself wandering around with an upside down map oblivious to the tank bearing down on you? Are you sitting in The Thinker’s pose amid the hail of bullets?
Reconnaissance and planning both have their place, in war and in life, but are you moving and firing when you need to? Or are you letting others dictate your movements?
Because if you don’t “move like you got a purpose” (as the movie sergeants like to say) and lay down some cover fire, someone else will happily take advantage of your indecision and direct your life for you. And they won’t present it as a choice.
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To the music of Teddy Bears’ Picnic, with apologies to Ron Moore, John Walter Bratton and Jimmy Kennedy. (You can hear the original Henry Hall/Val Rosing version (1932) in the Xbox 360 commercial “Water Balloons.”)
If all of this has happened before
And all will happen again
If all of this has happened before
Can they never be friends?
They still plot and kill and cry and curse
And the “sit rep” goes from bad to worse
’Cause that’s the way the humans and cylons picnic.
NB: I firmly believe that ideas conceived in the shower should not be held against one.
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Let their work be to them as is his common work to the common laborer. No gigantic efforts will then be necessary. He need tie no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,—as men have sat, or said that they have sat.
– Anthony Trollope in his autobiography (quoted in The New Yorker via Daily Routines)
Trollope’s habit was to write from 5:30 to 8:30 every morning with a quota of 250 words every fifteen minutes. He wrote 49 novels in 35 years, so I’m guessing he knew what he was talking about.
BTW, Daily Routines is an incredible resource on the work habits of famous folks.
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A caveman painted on a cave,
It was a bison, t’was a fave,
The other cavepeople would rave.
They didn’t ask “Why?”
Why paint a bison if it’s dead?
When did you choose the color red?
What was the process in your head?
He told their story,
What came before he didn’t show,
We’re not supposed to–Homer’s Odyssey was swell,
A bunch of guys that went through hell,
He told the tale but didn’t tell,
the audience why.
He didn’t say, “Here’s what it means”
And “Here’s a few deleted scenes”
“Charybdis tested well with teens”
He’s not the story,
He’s just a door we open if,
our lives need liftin’…But now we pick – pick – pick – pick – pick it apart,
Open it up to find the tick – tick – tick – of a heart,
A heart…
Broken.
– Joss Whedon, from the DVD commentary to his musical Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog . Yes, it’s a real musical commentary and it’s hilarious, aside from the serious bit here.
I was tickled when NPR played some of this in today’s Fresh Air interview with Whedon. You can listen to the song at the official Dr. Horrible YouTube channel (click “more info” on the right for the complete lyrics).
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I get my ideas from everywhere. But what all of my ideas boil down to is seeing maybe one thing, but in a lot of cases it’s seeing two things and having them come together in some new and interesting way, and then adding the question ‘What if?’ ‘What if’ is always the key question.
– Stephen King @ StephenKing.com
Even if you’ve never read a Stephen King novel (and I haven’t), read his book On Writing. It’s that good.
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The other day, someone fifteen years younger than me asked me what I wanted to be “One Day”.
I answered, “Doing exactly what I’m doing now, just with more money. And if the money doesn’t come, well, that’s a shame, but it’s not the end of the world, either.”
No more dreaming of “One Day”. I am here and now. This is it. I can highly recommend it. But I had to kill a lot of dreams, a lot of beautiful dreams, in order to get there.
– Hugh MacLeod @ GapingVoid.com
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