reminders to trust the process

"Whether you are an adult or child, your first attempts will often seem unimportant or foolish.

• The open mic night at a nearly empty bar.


• The early blog posts that get ignored.


• The dance recital on a little stage.

Early attempts are easy to dismiss because they don't seem to amount to much. But you have to do the low stakes stuff to prepare for the... See more

George Leonard on how mastery is nothing but a series of plateaus with brief spurts of progress:

“The most important lessons here — especially for young people — is that even if you’re shooting for the stars, you’re going to spend most of your time on a plateau. That’s where the deepest, most lasting learning takes place, so you might as well enjoy... See more

“The feeling of progress is one of the best feelings of all. This is true even when progress is small.”

a lot of times ideas and projects are formed out of a more ambient kind of thinking and talking and doing. Research is not always this thing of sitting down and concentratedly looking through archives or something.

The irony of organizing your life around mistake-avoidance is that, rather than making you feel calmer, it keeps you in an anxious state, ratcheting up the stakes of your life until you’re moving through it like you would a decision tree, each notable occurrence redirecting you toward a different destination. We’re meant to be. Wait no, we’re... See more