Keep Going

“Don’t make stuff because you want to make money—it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous—because you will never feel famous enough. Make gifts for people—and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts.” —John Green

“The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty, and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from.” —Lynda Barry

Job titles aren’t really for you, they’re for others. Let other people worry about them. Burn your business cards if you have to.

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day,

When you ignore quantitative measurements for a bit, you can get back to qualitative measurements. Is it good? Really good? Do you like it? You can also focus more on what the work does that can’t be measured. What it does to your soul.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter to a group of high school students and assigned them this homework: Write a poem and don’t show it to anybody. Tear it up into little pieces and throw them into the trash can.

“Do what you love” + low overhead = a good life. “Do what you love” + “I deserve nice things” = a time bomb.

“Doesn’t feel like work to me. Feels more like play.”

René Magritte said his goal with his art was “to breathe new life into the way we look at the ordinary things around us.” This is exactly what an artist does: By paying extra attention to their world, they teach us to pay more attention to ours. The first step toward transforming your life into art is to start paying more attention to it.

Me, I like the “caffeine nap”: Drink a cup of coffee or tea, lie down for fifteen minutes, and get back to work when the caffeine has kicked in.