loving the process

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.

Here’s something I’m very thankful I was told while I was still in my 20s: that the point of all this “hard work” is to recognize the person it makes you, not what it “gets” you

But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is... See more

Only that nothing works out the way you plan, which is a blessing every hour. Life always takes a different form, if only because life will always be more imaginative — deeper, wiser, more surprising — than you are.

I think we all want to be heard and music is a way to let out our inner emotional life, sometimes in a way that can’t necessarily be understood any other way. It functions different than prose or storytelling in that the music has an emotional base to it, even without the words. So you can feel this energy and express whatever’s going on inside of

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Adam Gopnik: In my lexicon – which may be idiosyncratic but I think is also illuminating – “achievement”represents all the outer-directed, institutionally compelled things we do to advance our lives or those of our children. Getting grades, passing classes, pushing forward into select colleges. All of that. “Accomplishment” on the other hand, means... See more