“Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and pulleys.” — Emma Bull
10 Ideas For The Interested This Week
44 Movie Scenes That Influenced How I Live My Life
For the past nine years I’ve published a new blog post on my birthday reflecting on things I’ve learned about life or experiences that have shaped me.
For example, last year I shared 43 ways I’ve learned to make life easier.
This year, as I turn 44, I thought about the role of movies in my life and in particular how specific scenes influenced or reflected my philosophy about life, work, and art.
Seven Ways to Get Better at Making Small Talk
“The fallback for a lot of people is like the newscast ‘hourly update’ — traffic, sports, weather and so on. Drill this into your head: It is a horrible icebreaker.”
How to Be More Ambitious
“Ambition is more likely to result once you’ve already put in some time and gotten good enough at something that you start to get better opportunities.”
Fred Rogers’ 1997 Lifetime Achievement Award Speech
“All of us have special ones who loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life.”
How to Know When It’s Time to Stop Researching and Make a Decision
“We think that rational decision-making means exhaustively enumerating our options, weighing each carefully, and then selecting the best. In practice, when the clock — or the ticker — is ticking, few aspects of decision-making, or of thinking more generally, are so important as one: when to stop.”
Three Ways to Break out of a Busyness Loop
“Action addiction is an advanced sort of laziness. It keeps us busily occupied with tasks. The busier we keep ourselves, the more we avoid being confronted with questions of life and death.”
How to Earn Money on Medium
“Some people have a lot of fear about publishing often because they think it will make readers sick of their work. But I think the only way that can happen is if you write about issues you don’t genuinely care about, or if your writing never gets better. And perhaps, if you’re never vulnerable.”
A Knowledge Processing System for Creators
“PKM is a systems approach to dealing with the firehose of fragmented information that bombards our headspace daily. Processes that help to efficiently gather, classify, store, search, and retrieve information that supports work activities and creative knowledge work (idea generation, insights, breakthroughs, big ideas, etc.).”
Great Art Doesn’t Have to Come out of Darkness
“I don’t believe that true creativeness comes out of misery and insanity.”