read this when the mind is loud

Obvious to you. Amazing to others. Any creator of anything knows this feeling: You experience someone else’s innovative work. It’s beautiful, brilliant, breath-taking. You’re stunned. Their ideas are unexpected and surprising, but perfect. You think, “I never would have thought of that. How do they even come up with that? It’s genius!” Afterwards,

Separate creation and release. When you’ve finished a work, wait a while before you release it to the world. By then, you’re on to something new. The public comments won’t affect you, since they will be about your past work.

When your thinking is contaminated by negative emotions, make as few decisions and engage in as few interactions as possible. This keeps these emotions from spilling over into your life.

Judge a goal by how well it changes your actions in the present moment.

When friendship is settled, you must trust; before friendship is formed, you must pass judgment.

Make a story for the things you want to remember. Never make a story for the things you want to forget. Let those disappear with time. Your memories are a mix of fact and fiction. Your story about an experience overwrites your memory of the actual experience. So use this in your favor. Re-write your past. Embellish adventures. Disempower trauma.

Most trouble is caused by action. No action, no trouble. Most actions are a pursuit of emotions. You think you want to take action or own a thing. But what you really want is the emotion you think it’ll bring. Skip the actions. Go straight for the emotion. Practice feeling emotions intentionally, instead of using actions to create them. You don’t

When a musician covers someone else’s song, they reveal their own warped perspective, since we know what the original sounds like. Because of this, performing a cover song is actually a great way to defne who you are as an artist. When a musician writes a new song that imitates someone else’s song, almost nobody notices the similarity. People don’t

When life or a plan feels ultimately unsatisfying, I fnd it’s because I’ve forgotten to fnd the intersection of all three: • What makes me happy • What’s smart • What’s useful to others 88 sive.rs/hsu