making a life > making a living
“I know a lot of people who make things who don’t stand proudly by their stuff,” Tyler says. “I don’t know if they’re too cool or they don’t want to look thirsty, but they’ll put a song out once on their stories — and that’s it.
You went through something. You figured something out in a structured format. You recorded it. Not just one take. Parts and parts. You edited it. You mixed it. The label paid some kid to make an album cover and they made the cover. It’s a whole thing.
And then you mean to tell me that you’re going to be passive and just put it on your story once? Are you crazy, bro?
I’m still promoting an album that came out a year ago. I put too much time and energy into this finished project just to put it on Instagram and forget about it. No. Promote. Let people know. Be proud of what you made.”
— Tyler, The Creator
I’m always amused when I get credit for coming up with the 100-Day Project, because part of what makes it interesting is that there’s nothing original about it. It’s what we all do every day. We do routine things, and we do things that require acts of imagination that we’re never going to do again, whether it’s naming a goldfish or responding to a ... See more
Michael Bierut • The Art of Dailiness, by Michael Bierut
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
— Annie Dillard, ’The Writing Life’, 1989
A lot of the time realising more in my personal life means doing less in my professional life, but I am absolutely fine with that trade off because my end goal isn’t to build a massive multimillion dollar business, it’s to build a life that’s creative and fulfilling.
Matilda Lucy • Growing a portfolio career with Anna Mackenzie
About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap : situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.
The mediocrity trap is a nasty way t... See more
The mediocrity trap is a nasty way t... See more
Adam Mastroianni • So You Wanna De-Bog Yourself
“What would be the most effective way to design your life so that you get to do more of that—assuming nothing about the shape of the solution and reasoning up from first principles?”
Instead of thinking “I want to be a musician (and that means having a label and making albums, and so on),” I suggest that we think about it as a design problem. The fi... See more
Instead of thinking “I want to be a musician (and that means having a label and making albums, and so on),” I suggest that we think about it as a design problem. The fi... See more