Self care
You can get the important stuff right and still lose by not enduring long enough
Scott Belsky • The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
Ritual prevents the ordinary from dissolving into invisibility. If you light a candle at dinner, the meal becomes an event. If you walk at the same time each day, it becomes more than exercise. Anthropologists will tell you that rituals function as technologies of attention: certain ordinary acts aren’t trivial, they’re the architecture of meaning.
Don’t do cocaine, do literature
open.substack.com
When people turn to harmful forms of escape, what they’re really trying to do is quiet the noise of existence. They want silence, the relief of not having to feel everything so loudly and intensely.
Strange, isn't it? To have dedicated one's life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one's life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one's labors ultimately forgotten?
George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
The question of impact is my favorite. If the people doing the impacting are tired and sick and frustrated and have all these needs that are not being met, what good is that impact? The quality of work that we can do for each other depends on the quality of care that we’re experiencing and cultivating for ourselves. I can’t say that enough.
Alexis Aceves Garcia • What if care is the work?
You're wasting your potential by not taking care of yourself. You could change the world, but it requires you to strive to be at your best everyday. And you can't do that if you havent taken care of yourself. If you havent slept, eaten well, calmed your mind, thought about your work, Organized your life.
Many of the great artists are up early, taking advantage of the quiet hours to listen to the muse. But you can, because you stayed up late and spent all of the previous day not doing the right things to take care of yourself.
When we take care of ourselves, we can better show up for the people we love.
Beth Pickens • Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles
The martyrdom playbook is manic.
An engine of depression, anxiety, metabolic dysfunction, and disease. It breeds impaired judgment, immune system collapse, and emotional chaos.
People crave status, respect, and visibility so deeply that they will contort themselves into whatever shape... See more
I'm building ai systems to do things I couldn't have dreamt of 4 years ago, and I'm spending no time on the systems that will actually allow me to see them come into reality