Merce Cardus's Blog, page 111
February 2, 2015
Greg McKeown On Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
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Video of the day:
Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.
Greg McKeown is the author of the New York times Best Seller Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
. He is a b...
MONDAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing & Better Living: Reading Between The Wines
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Quote of the day
I will make the case that wine belongs in a life of the soul, in an erotic life (in the Greek sense of eros as the force of life), but to encounter it there you have to be unsentimental and willing to demand authenticity from the wine and from yourself.
~TERRY THEISE, author ofReading between the Wines.
SELF-IMPROVEMENT
7 Habits of highly resilient people [The Other Kind of Smart
], FastCo| Tweet
Success is seldom a straight road; it al...
January 30, 2015
A Spiritual Path To Higher Creativity
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Art is a spiritual transaction.
The Artist’s Wayleads us to a spiritual path to higher creativity, using exercises, tasks, essays, and a weekly check-in.
Recovering a sense of identity:
Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music—the worldis so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful sould and interesting people. Forget yourself—Henry Miller.
I shut my eyes in order to see—Paul Gauguin.
Recovering a sense...
Happiness and its Surprises
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If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself. Tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.
~RAINER MARIA RILKE
In her book Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff refutes the social origins of beauty, in favor of far more prosaic and evolutionary explanations. Looking for a partner with clear skin? You’re actually checking for parasites. And let’s just say there’s a reason high heels are always in fashion.
Her rece...
WEEKEND LINKS ~ Reads on Writing & Better Living: The Power Of Touch
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Quote of the day:
You can’t turn off touch. It never goes away.You can close your eyes and imagine what it’s like to be blind, and you can stop up your ears and imagine what it’s like to be deaf. But touch is so central and ever-present in our lives that we can’t imagine losing it.
~DAVID LINDEN, author ofTouch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind
THE MIND
What a child can teach a smart computer, WSJ| Tweet
Everyone knows that Alan Turing
helped to invent...
January 29, 2015
The Art Of War For Writers
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The commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage, and strictness.
—Sun Tzu.
In The Art of War for Writers
, James Scott, offers helpful observations based on more than twenty years in the fiction writing game.The writer must understand the essentials of success for a long-term writing career, and count the cost accordingly.
1. Desire.
2.Discipline.
3.Commitment to craft.
4.Patience.
5.Honesty.
6.Wil...
How to Find Fulfilling Work
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Without work, all life goes rotten, but ‘when work is soulless, life stifles and dies,’ wrote Albert Camus.
Roman Krznaric is a cultural thinker and writer on the art of living. He is a founding faculty member of The School of Life in London, and advises organisations. He is the author ofHow to Fi
nd Fulfilling Work
The idea that work might be fulfilling rather than just painfully necessary is strikingly recent invention. Doctor Johnson celebrated di...
THURSDAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing & Better Living: Feeding The Content Monster
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The biggest daily challenge of social media is finding enough content to share. We call this “feeding the Content Monster.” There are two ways to do this: content creation and content curation.
~GUY KAWASAKI, author ofThe Art of Social Media.
BRANDING
Personal branding: a fine line between ego and enterprise success [The Art of Social Media
], Forbes| Tweet
With the growth of personal blogs, social media, and other online media, there has been a rapid rise...
January 28, 2015
The Last Book on (Screen)writing You’ll Ever Need
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Save The Cat! 
offersinsights to write screenplays but also novels. Blake Snyd
er founds basic to put the ‘Save the Cat’ scene into movies. It’s the scene where we meet the hero and the hero does something—like saving a cat—that defines who he is and makes us, the audience, like him.
It’s about a guy who…
The perfect hero is the one who offers the most conflict in the situation, has the longest emotional journey, and has a primal goal we can all root for...
How To Make Hard Choices
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Video of the day:
When Ruth Chang graduated from college, she was presented with a choice: Should she pursue a career in philosophy, or a career in law? Soon after finishing Harvard Law School and dipping her toe in the legal world, she regretted her decision and switched paths. She went off to Oxford University to study philosophy and has been a philosopher studying choice, freedom, value and action ever since. She is the author ofMaking Comparisons...
