Way-Life-Ing

The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it… [T]he work itself. It drives the spooks away.

-Bonnie Friedman

Kurt Vonnegut, talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:

“Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of b

Jim Simons: "I’m not an extremely fast thinker myself; I just work hard."

That was all I needed to do—work hard, not fast. A paper I published in '68 took me five years. But it has had 1,850 citations. For a math paper, that’s an awful lot.

There’s too much emphasis on a person’s being able to answer questions quickly."