purpose

Conviction is an extension of self-knowledge. It emerges from your experiences and prior conditions. To know that is to know yourself. Being someone with conviction is really just living with clarity, and everything else is downstream of this self-knowledge.

In the short term a 1-of-1 purpose will almost always fail. Every day is yet another moment that people didn’t follow your vision and the world failed to transform according to your ideas. The failures are literally limitless.

With a longer view, however, this process looks different. Eighty straight days of struggling in the darkness can produce... See more

"One doesn't expect to get from life what one has already learned it cannot give, rather, one begins to see that life is a kind of sowing time... and the harvest is not yet here. He was just a humble preacher's son. And yes, he had his demons, but they never stopped him from searching for beauty. Because when you find beauty, you find inspiration.... See more

Kurt Vonnegut on picking a lane:

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way—although I would not be sorry if you wrote one,... See more