the start of an idea
starting well, the beginning of a project, that kind of stuff
sari and
the start of an idea
When you’re at the beginning, don’t obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there
Dan Heath • Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Sometimes, You Have To Say No To Your Friends To Say Yes To Your Work
When asked, Lin-Manuel Miranda says Wait For It is the best song he’s ever written. “I was on my way to my friend’s birthday party,” Miranda explains, “when that idea showed up in my head.” He was riding the New York City A Train when “the whole chorus showed up in my head, all at... See more
When asked, Lin-Manuel Miranda says Wait For It is the best song he’s ever written. “I was on my way to my friend’s birthday party,” Miranda explains, “when that idea showed up in my head.” He was riding the New York City A Train when “the whole chorus showed up in my head, all at... See more
“There’s the old anecdote we were all taught in Psych 101,” Martin said, “which is that physical environment matters. I think a separate device matters here: sometimes you’re reading, and you’re in a slow section, and you have that random thought, like, what was that thing I wanted to buy on Amazon? And you’re there without thinking about it.” A... See more
The Boox Palma is an amazing gadget I didn’t even know I wanted
More generally, it’s not beginnings and ends that count, but middles. Things and thoughts advance or grow out from the middle, and that’s where you have to get to work, that’s where everything unfolds.
– Gilles Deleuze, On Leibniz
social media and podcasts might give you the illusion that you can start a business or start building an audience and take off right away. you should expect your new career to take 1,000 days to replace what you could have made in your old one. If you’re not willing to wait 1,000 days for your new career to work, don’t bother starting.
when making things becomes frictionless, starting stops meaning anything.
day 0 is loud. day 2 is real.
Here are some other techniques people use to access and maintain the zone:
- Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. Annie Ernaux writes about this in A Simple Passion, a memoir about how she becomes obsessed in a banal way with a man who is having an affair with her—the thought that others will read