Halil Akgündüz
@dozuki
Halil Akgündüz
@dozuki
Open-minded people can take in the thoughts of others without losing their ability to think well—they can hold two or more conflicting concepts in their mind and go back and forth between them to assess their relative merits.
Ed Sheeran and Neil Gaiman are in the top 0.000001% of their fields. They're among, say, 25 people in the world who repeatedly generate blockbusters.
If two world-class creators share the exact same creative process, I get curious. Also, while writing this, I found a video of John Mayer doing the same thing.
I call their approach the Creativity
... See moreWhen the tea market collapsed, the distributing system that had been put in place and capitalized by the British East India Company turned to the production and selling of opium and the exploitation of the Chinese population that was outside of the colonial system proper. The invention of morphine (1803) and then heroin (1873) carries us to the
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To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.
