“I just believe that the interesting time in a career is pre-success, what shaped things, how did you get to this point?”
― Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
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“I just believe that the interesting time in a career is pre-success, what shaped things, how did you get to this point?” ― Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
“Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.”
― Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
When you read a biography, everybody wants to know the beginning. There's always a part of the biography after they're super rich and famous and they're donating a bunch of money and I'm glad they're doing all that, that's fundamentally not interesting. How many people can relate to that? But everybody can relate to, hey, I have a dream. This is wh... See more
Patrick O'Shaughnessy • Passion & Pain
Absolutely. Especially in success. Once you’ve been successful, there’s a lot of pressure to continue that, whereas usually when you were doing the thing that made you successful in the first place, nobody was looking and nobody cared. Then when you get successful, there’s all this pressure. It’s like, “Oh, now I’m making something and everybody’s
... See moreRick Rubin • Creativity, According to Rick Rubin
“The heaviness of being successful,” Steve Jobs said of his prodigal-son time after being forced out of Apple, “was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
Doug Menuez • Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985-2000
"Whether you are an adult or child, your first attempts will often seem unimportant or foolish.
Early attempts are easy to dismiss because they don't seem to amount to much. But you have to do the low stakes stuff to prepare for the ... See more
- The open mic night at a nearly empty bar.
- The early blog posts that get ignored.
- The dance recital on a little stage.
Early attempts are easy to dismiss because they don't seem to amount to much. But you have to do the low stakes stuff to prepare for the ... See more
3-2-1: When to be patient, why we procrastinate, and the importance of early attempts
I believe what Steve Jobs said about how you “only connect the dots in retrospect,” but every once in a while, you know with unshakeable certainty that this moment you’re in right now is a massive new dot getting drawn. You don’t know exactly where you’ll go from here, or even what exactly to make of the experience, but you know it will have been a... See more