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June 29 - July 23, 2020
“Happiness is wanting what you have.”
“The difference between the people you admire and everybody else [is that the former are] the people who read.”
What Would You Say in a College Commencement Speech? “Well, I would say that if you are searching for status, and if you are doing things because there’s an audience for it, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. “I would say, ‘Listen to yourself.’ Follow your bliss, and Joseph Campbell, to bring it back around, said, ‘There is great security in insecurity.’ We are wired and programmed to do what’s safe and what’s sensible. I don’t think that’s the way to go. I think you do things because they are just things you have to do, or because it’s a calling, or because you’re idealistic enough to
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“When people seem like they are mean, they’re almost never mean. They’re anxious.”
“Wasn’t it Bill Clinton who said that when dealing with anyone who’s upset, he always asks, ‘Has this person slept? Have they eaten? Is somebody else bugging them?’ He goes through this simple checklist. . . . When we’re handling babies and the baby is kicking and crying, we almost never once say, ‘That baby’s out to get me’ or ‘She’s got evil intentions.’”
“The very word ‘success’ has become contaminated by our ideas of someone extraordinary, very rich, etc., and that’s really unhelpful. . . . Ultimately, to be properly successful is to be at peace as well.”
“The more you know what you really want, and where you’re really going, the more what everybody else is doing starts to diminish. The moments when your own path is at its most ambiguous, [that’s when] the voices of others, the distracting chaos in which we live, the social media static start to loom large and become very threatening.”
“To blame someone for not understanding you fully is deeply unfair because, first of all, we don’t understand ourselves, and even if we do understand ourselves, we have such a hard time communicating ourselves to other people. Therefore, to be furious and enraged and bitter that people don’t get all of who we are is a really a cruel piece of immaturity.”
Alain’s list overlaps nearly 100% with my own: Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell.
Advice to your 30-year-old self? “I would have said, ‘Appreciate what’s good about this moment. Don’t always think that you’re on a permanent journey. Stop and enjoy the view.’ . . . I always had this assumption that if you appreciate the moment, you’re weakening your resolve to improve your circumstances. That’s not true, but I think when you’re young, it’s sort of associated with that. . . . I had people around me who’d say things like, ‘Oh, a flower, nice.’ A little part of me was thinking, ‘You absolute loser. You’ve taken time to appreciate a flower? Do you not have bigger plans? I mean,
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flowers and a pretty sky, or just a morning where nothing’s wrong and everyone’s been pretty nice to everyone else. . . . Fortune can do anything with us. We are very fragile creatures. You only need to tap us or hit us in slightly the wrong place. . . . You only have to push us a little bit, and we crack very easily, whether that’s the pressure of disgrace or physical illness, financial pressure, etc. It doesn’t take very much. So, we do have to appreciate every day that goes by without a major disaster.”
This frantic, self-congratulatory busyness is a distinctly upscale affliction.
what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s most often said by people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed:
They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they are addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
I recently learned a neologism that, like political correctness, man cave, and content-provider, I instantly recognized as heralding an ugly new turn in the culture: planshopping. That is, deferring committing to any one plan for an evening until you know what all your options are, and then picking the one that’s most likely to be fun/advance your career/have the most girls at it—in other words, treating people like menu options or products in a catalog.
This busyness is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it.
What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality—driven, cranky, anxious, and sad—turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment, of the crushing atmospheric pressure of ambition and competitiveness.
Zoologist Konrad Lorenz calls “the rushed existence into which industrialized, commercialized man has precipitated himself” and all its attendant afflictions—ulcers, hypertension, neuroses, etc.—an “inexpedient development,” or evolutionary maladaptation, brought on by our ferocious intraspecies competition. He likens us to birds whose alluringly long plumage has rendered them flightless, easy prey.
I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.
This busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness: Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. All this noise and rush and stress seem contrived to drown out or cover up some fear at the center of our lives.
I’ll say it: I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.
It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what that might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
Time and quiet should not be luxury items.
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence, or a vice: It is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets.
The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration...
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“Idle dreaming is often the essence of what we do,” writes Thomas Pynchon...
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Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll and Hyde, the benzine ring: history is full of stories of inspirations t...
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“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was in fact Arthur C. Clarke,
I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle.
Even though my own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since you can always make more money.
Life is too short to be busy.
“Lesson number one, when people ask me what [interviewing] tips would I give, is aim for the heart, not the head. Once you get the heart, you can go to the head. Once you get the heart and the head, then you’ll have a pathway to the soul.”
“Listening is about being present, not just being quiet.”
“What are some of the choices you’ve made that made you who you are?”
Cal once asked Harry Crews, novelist and author of A Feast of Snakes and Car, how he could remember anything, given how much booze and drugs he consumed. Harry kept no diary. His response was, “Boy, the good shit sticks.”
“We all know the feeling of wanting to do something so well and so badly that we try too hard and can’t do it at all.”
think the best decision I made was just to say, ‘Let’s really start over. Let’s just completely empty our cup here and really think about what is valuable to me now. What’s honest. What’s sincere about
what we’re doing? Let’s do that.’
I think people want things that are really passionate, and often, the best version they could be is not for everybody. . . . The best art divides the audience.
Advice to your younger self? “To be kinder to myself, because I think I’ve beaten myself up a lot. I expect a lot from myself, I’ll be hard on myself, and I don’t know that I’m doing anyone any good by doing that.”
“I think, ultimately, that’s a myth. I think that your take on things is specific to you [and not dependent on perfectionism]—it’s almost like you’ve won the war, and to accept the fact that you’ve won the war: You have an audience. People are willing to hear what you are interested in, what you’re interested in learning about, and what you want to share. You can do that without killing yourself. And killing yourself won’t be of service, neither to you nor your audience.”
The Beginning Is “heart work,” not “head work” “So much of the job is more emotion and ‘heart work’ than it is ‘head work.’ The head comes in after, to look at what the heart has presented and to organize it. But the initial inspiration comes from a different place, and it’s not the head, and it’s not an intellectual activity.”
“Going to museums and looking at great art can help you write better songs. Reading great novels . . . seeing a great movie . . . reading poetry. . . . The only way to use the inspiration of other artists is if you submerge yourself in the greatest works of all time. . . .
Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding and others: ambitones like The Zen Effect in the key of C for 30 minutes, made by Rolfe Kent,
On a book deadline, I pick 1 or 2 albums and 1 or 2 movies for late-night writing sessions, as I do my best work between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. Polling the most prolific authors I know, more than 90% do their best work when others are sleeping, whether they start after 10 p.m. or wake up well before 6 a.m. Personally, I’ll play a movie on mute in the background to avoid feeling isolated, and listen to 1 or 2 albums per session, repeating both the movie and the music over and over. This means that I’ve “seen” some movies literally 100-plus times, as I might play a single film 3 to 6 times per
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The 4-Hour Workweek Films: The Bourne Identity, Shaun of the Dead “Flow” album: Gran Hotel Buenos Aires by Federico Aubele “Wake-up” album: One-X by Three Days Grace The 4-Hour Body Films: Casino Royale, Snatch “Flow” album: Luciano Essential Mix (2009, Ibiza) featuring DeadMau5 “Wake-up” album: Cold Day Memory by Sevendust The 4-Hour Chef Films: Babe (Yes, the pig movie. It was the first thing that popped up for free under Amazon Prime. I watched it once as a joke and it stuck. “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.” Gets me every time.) “Flow” album: “Just Jammin’” extended single track by Gramatik
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“There are only four stories: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power, and the journey. Every single book that is in the bookstore deals with these four archetypes, these four themes.”
“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.”
There is this notepad by my side, and I take notes, but I take notes only to take them out from my head. They will be useless the next day.
“Keep it simple. Trust your reader. He or she has a lot of imagination. Don’t try to describe things. Give a hint, and they will fulfill this hint with their own imagination.
