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Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Inspirational story from James Altucher:
I call it “the push”.
You’re riding the bicycle up the hill all the time in life. Everything in life wants you to decay. To be subjugated. To be violated. To be tired. To become a ghost.
To roll back down the hill just when you thought you were close to the top.
It’s fucking tiring to live.
What can give us THE PUSH?
It always gets better, as long as you keep pushing.
What to do next
Stress can be exciting.
The stress of your next presentation, your next gig, your next work of art, your next tweet.
Past success adds even more pressure. We all want to go out on top. Risking repetition makes us vulnerable.
What goes up must come down. But what goes up can also stay up.
Uncertainty is the freedom to experience and discover new truths. It creates opportunities.
No one ever progressed by doing nothing.
“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” - Pablo Picasso
Inspiration is just the fuel. Stop dreaming and start doing.
Don’t let inspiration backlash.
“Constantly seeking inspiration is anti-inspiring.” - Derek Sivers
His message: Own up. Take responsibility now. No fence-sitting.
So many of us hesitate, waiting for mass acceptance. Believe in what’s right and push for it. Don’t wait.
“The “idea muscle” atrophies within days if you don’t use it. Just like walking. If you don’t use your legs for a week, they atrophy. You need to exercise the idea muscle. It takes about 3-6 months to build up once it atrophies. Trust me on this.”
Use it or lose it. Carry your phone or a pen and paper wherever you go to capture all your ideas. It’s only lunacy of you lose them. You need content to come back to later and connect.
Alex Day on becoming a pop star with no experience:
“You do it by doing it.”
Doing is learning. Doing is progressing, even if it means you haven’t shipped yet.
Good things come through confidence, composure, and persistance.
Doing it is steady progression.
Quotes are the actual fabric with which the mind weaves: internalizing them, but also turning them inside out, quarreling with them, adding to them, wandering through their architecture as if a single sentence were an expansible labyrinthine space.
Below are some absolute gems on commuting.
First, the etymology of “commute” Americanized:
The word crossed over to use in a railway context in the US, where regular travellers began to swap day tickets for better-value season tickets; they “commuted” their daily tickets into season tickets.
Second, the concept of commuting as a “third place” to get stuff done away from home and work.
It was a new kind of time in the day: an interstitial mental space between home life and work.
And thirdly, the article explains how commuting via train is a mysteriously personal and more peaceful experience than any other commute:
And that, perhaps is why people go quiet in the underground. It’s the only time we experience a combination of 21st-century technology (the trains), 19th-century technology and vision (the tunnels, the network) and our paleolithic deep self. A person on the underground is experiencing the rare chance to be a 21st-century Victorian caveman.
I’m working on a book right now that compares how riding the train predicts many of the everyday things we see in life. Life is the insides of the train in slow motion.
Jeff Lin on Ang Lee
You hear it all the time but it’s true.
Creativity is just connecting disparate things, shipping them, and seeing what works.
But here’s the paradox: living life as a performance is not only a recipe for stress and unhappiness; it also leads to mediocre performance. If you want to get better at anything, you need to experiment with an open mind, to try and fail, to willingly accept and learn from any outcome.
Passion, curiosity, excitement; these things trend above performance. Go goalless and ride the fun in doing the work. You can do a serious evaluation afterward.
