In 1997, at the age of 27, Matt Damon won his first Academy Award for Best Screenplay ( Good Will Hunting ). After Damon won the Oscar, he went home, sat down on his sofa, and looked at the award. As he looked at it, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a heartbreaking thought: “I remember very clearly looking at that award and thinking, ‘Imagine chasing... See more
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important... See more
And then there is the most dangerous risk of all -- the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.
B); barring an unexpected surprise, the solution to a mediocre problem will have incremental impact, whereas solving an important problem will have greater impact. Even if you execute well, it is hard to make the solution to a middling problem interesting. In... See more
“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of [lightning] to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”