Becky Lloyd Pack
- A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems — you ceased hoping your ... See more
- I have no patience for those who use our desperate situation as an excuse for inaction. I’ve learned that if you deprive most of these people of that particular excuse they just find another, then another, then another. The use of this excuse to justify inaction — the use of any excuse to justify inaction — reveals nothing more nor less than an inc... See more
I held on to those other sources of income for so long because I never wanted to burden my writing with the responsibility of paying for my life. I knew better than to ask this of my writing, because over the years, I have watched so many other people murder their creativity by demanding that their art pay the bills.
from Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
because of my deep and lifelong conviction that the results of my work don’t have much to do with me. I can only be in charge of producing the work itself. That’s a hard enough job. I refuse to take on additional jobs, such as trying to police what anybody thinks about my work once it leaves my desk.
from Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
- Skye Cleary, in her book about the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, explains it like this:
To become authentic means to create our own essence. It’s the creation that is vital here. We don’t discover ourselves, we make ourselves.
from What Makes Self-Knowledge So Shareable
- When we let others define the desirable effects we judge our actions by, we become tools of their agenda rather than agents of our own goals. Further, when we don't even realize we've let some other authority choose our desirable effects, we get caught in a frustrating cycle. Effective action may lead to more frustration rather than alleviating it.
from What Works? by Tara McMullin
- Is running five miles better than running three miles? No. One is only farther than the other. Is reading more books in a year better than reading fewer? No. It's just a meaningless statistic one can track on GoodReads.
So maybe 'better' needs to be a watchword as we navigate the 21st-century economy. 'Better' tips us off to an assumed judgment. It ... See morefrom Questioning What's Better by Tara McMullin