self renewal

“If you want to be successful, you must respect one rule – never lie to yourself.”

—Paulo Coelho

“Things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. When you understand that, you abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece.” - Leonard Cohen

Old paradigms die hard. Puking, sweating, convulsing every vestige of What No Longer Works into a heaping pile of shitty compost that will eventually grow something new and beautiful, but not until you’re scraped raw of every notion of what that might be.

Humans aren’t meant to excavate their inner feelings until they find their “true self.” We become ourselves in relation, not through introspection.

yesterday a friend said: “doesn’t freelancing make you feel simultaneously self-actualized and completely behind in life?”

and yeah. that’s exactly it.

freelancing makes me feel free, and terrified, and proud, and like a failure.

all at once. every day.

The fear of making mistakes is a particularly strong dampener on one’s learning. You can’t learn if you can’t make mistakes. I like the idea that mastery is simply a very intimate understanding of all the possible mistakes one could make.

And this is why I put “ayy lmao” in my meme about the heart of philosophy. Laughter is the divine thing that transmutes stupid bullshit into something real. It cracks up the edifice of polite fictions and tedious prattle and gets to the heart of things. And fun, I think, always has a spirit of laughter about it, even if you’re doing it quietly with... See more

if there’s some odd way that you particularly enjoy doing things, then you should probably prioritize that over any system that anybody else advises you to do.