loving the process

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners – and I could list a hundred

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The end game was never convenience but a texture-rich life that challenges and rewards us. Not happiness as a frictionless state, but satisfaction earned through the friction itself.

This journey from naming what you want to achieving it isn't accidental. It follows a path that, in many ways, mirrors training for a marathon. And just like with marathon training, each phase requires different skills, different mindsets, and different kinds of courage.

The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more

The moat of low status is one of my favorite concepts, courtesy of my husband Sasha. The idea is that making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.

I’m starting to wonder if the process isthe art. What do you mean by that? Maybe the photographing, the writing—maybe the tangible forms of the work are only the receipts of something much more important. What do you mean by that? I’m not exactly sure yet. But I’m paying close attention.

Again, the idea of manifesting your own ideas of success, your reasons for life, plays a huge role here. It allows ego to be put to the side in favor of accomplishing a common goal, an idea that we can do it differently this time.