Stephen King wrote in his memoir, On Writing, “There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer screen. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there, you have to furnish an apartment

What saved his life? A 32-month prison sentence. It wasn’t until he went to the prison library and began teaching inmates to read that he woke up from his haze. “You’ll feel like for the first time in your life that you’re doing something for somebody else,” he writes. “That it’s not all about you. And your narcissism will start to wane.”

divorcing your beliefs from yourself.

The first is to evalute the current state of your beliefs. In her podcast, Rationally Speaking, Galef often asks her guests the following questions: “What have you changed your mind about?” and “What do you think are the strongest arguments against your view?”

In a tweet, Musk suggests that people need to develop better “mental firewalls for the information constantly coming at us,” adding that a course on critical thinking should be a requirement in middle school. “Who wrote the software running in your head? Are you sure you actually want it there?”

When the pain levels began to feel insurmountable, Boone knew that if she lost control of her mind, she would inevitably lose control of her body. So she used the technique of “making friends with pain.” “I don’t ever want to see pain as an adversary. Pain is your friend.

It’s good to be alone, society tells us, it’s self-care. When a friend is going through a trying time, we prescribe loneliness masquerading as empowerment. Tough breakup? Grab a copy of Eat, Pray, Love, and go on a month-long silent meditation retreat. Hard week at work? Pour yourself a glass of wine, cancel your plans, and binge on Netflix until

Creativity is less a fleeting moment of inspiration and more a muscle that can be trained through consistent exercise. “People like to think the creative process is romantic,” Achatz says. “The artist drifts to sleep at night, to be awakened by the subliminal echoes of his or her next brilliant idea. The truth, for me at least, is that creativity

“I often say that being creative is simply being aware of your surroundings, and translating these impulses into a specific medium,” Achatz once wrote. “For me, that medium is cooking and dining.”