Merce Cardus's Blog, page 69

Entrepreneur, You Need a Manifesto

The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: Why Now Is the Time to #JoinTheRidewill prepare you for the wild ride of entrepreneurship. It will warn you (of forthcoming fears, doubts, and the self-defeating conditioning of your upbringing and past), inoculate you (from the naysayers, dream-stealers, and pains of rejection and failure), and guide you (as you build those under-developed skills of independence, self-motivation, and self-accountability) safely past the landmines that blow up and cause th...

THURSDAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing, Self-Publishing & Better Living: Zen in the Art of Writing

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Quote of the day

What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

~RAY BRADBURY, author ofZen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity

WRITING

Blow-By-Blow: Writing Action and Fight Scenes, Writer’s Digest| Tweet

Conflict, as we all know, is the lifeblood of a story. And nothing quite epitomizes raw conflict like a thrilling fight scene. If you’re like me, you cr...

The Six Successors to the Elevator Pitch

Elisha Oti’s breakthrough had a catalytic effect on many industries, including the business of giving advice. Almost from the moment that elevators became commonplace, gurus like Dale Carnegie advised us to be ever ready with our “elevator speech.”

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Othersoffers a fresh look at the art and science of selling.

The Elevator Pitch

The idea was that if you found yourself stepping into an elevator and encountering the big boss, you needed to be...

True Stories Don’t Tell the Whole Truth

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Novelis a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling.The acclaimed author delved deeply into magic realism for his latest book. Here, he describes why this genre continues to thrive.

Stories don’t have to be true

That by including elements of the fantastic or elements of fable or mythological elements or fairy tale or just pure make believe, you can actually start getting at the truth in a different way....

HUMP DAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing, Self-Publishing & Better Living: Date-onomics

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Quote of the day

A 2013 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that 15 percent of school-age boys had received an ADHD diagnosis (versus just 7 percent for girls), a diagnosis rate so over the top that some researchers believe simple immaturity is now being misdiagnosed as ADHD.

~JON BIRGER, author ofDate-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game

WRITING

Unique Writing Resources: Helpful Checklists and Tip Sheets, Writers He...

The Confidence of Oscar Wilde

Applying the power of wit to the right times and place s, seeingwhat it can and cannot do, and fiddling with the dials until the repartee is right where you want it to be.

We’ve all been in tha situation where we need to say something clever but innocuous; something smart enough to show some intelligence without showing off; something funny but not a joke. What we need in that moment is wit–that sparkling combination of charm, humor, confidence, and, most of all, the right words at the right...

How Memories Form and How We Lose Them

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering EverythingrecountsJoshua Foer’s yearlong quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top “mental athletes”.

Think back to really vivid memory. Got it? Okay, now try to remember what you had for lunch three weeks ago.

That second memory probably isn’t as strong but why not?

Why do we remember some things, and not others? And why do memories eventually fade?

How memories form

When you experience something, like dialing a ph...

TUESDAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing, Self-Publishing & Better Living: The Creative Habit

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Quote of the day

When I walk into [the studio] I am alone, but I am alone with my body, ambition, ideas, passions, needs, memories, goals, prejudices, distractions, fears.

These ten items are at the heart of who I am. Whatever I am going to create will be a reflection of how these have shaped my life, and how I’ve learned to channel my experiences into them.

The last two — distractions and fears — are the dangerous ones. They’re the habitual demons...

A Secret For Unleashing Creative Expression

Every act and gesture, no matter how seemingly small or irr elevant, is a bearer of expression.

The theory and practice of creativity—culled from the lifetime of experiences of an esteemed art educator/therapist, Shaun McNiff. In Imagination in Actionwith proven techniques, he’s discovered for jump-starting the creative process.

Dynamics of Witnessing:

What We See and Miss

We practice witnessing with the assumption that every act and gesture, no matter how seemingly small or irrelevant, is a...

How Engineering Helped Hitchcock Scare the Pants off of You

Did you know Alfred Hitchcock was a formally trained engineer?

Biomedical engineer Guru Madhavan, author of Applied Minds: How Engineers Think,could see evidence of this in Hitchcock’s movies. An engineering background can not only inform a director’s shooting decisions, but also equips him or her with the necessary modular system kind of thinking to be good at assembling a good film.

Having a Background in Engineering

I only very recently got into Mr. [Alfred] Hitchcock’s films and I wa...