J. Garcia

Do we have principles we hold dear, and a vision for the future we want to create? Or are we fumbling along, tinkering, finding what works, and forever allowing contact with reality to rearrange our mental furniture, make a mess on our conceptual floor, and occasionally punch so many holes in the walls that need to strip our whole idea-house down

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Don't let your worst moments become your story.

You blow the presentation and spend the drive home scripting perfect comebacks to an audience that's already gone. Your relationship ends and you spend months replaying conversations that can't be changed. All the time spent perfecting the past is stolen from the future that's still waiting.

The past is... See more

When you experience someone else’s genius work, a little part of you feels, “That’s what I could have, would have, and should have done!”

Someone else did it. You didn’t.

They fought the resistance. You gave in to distractions.

They made it top priority. You said you’d get to it some day.

They took the time. You meant to.

When this happens, you can... See more

It’s any time someone hesitates to make the thing they desperately want to make because they succumb to the avoidable things that kill creativity. There is never enough money or time. You will never feel you have enough knowledge. There are no perfect market conditions. Ideas never (read: shouldn’t) come with a guarantee of success. Just make the t

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Churchill said another way to spell “perfectionism” is P-A-R-A-L-Y-S-I-S. It’s good to have high standards but all virtues become vices if taken too far.

The fetishization of problematic Black artists in America by white listeners is a well-documented tradition that goes back at least as far as Alan Lomax interviewing and recording Lead Belly while he was imprisoned for attempted murder at Louisiana State Penitentiary in the 1930s.