Maria Potoroczyn
@mariapotoroczyn_1
Maria Potoroczyn
I spent many years telling myself that if I try hard enough and am a talented person, than I should be able to thrive in the work culture that surrounded me—that fast-paced, extroverted, competitive, hard core, pedal to the metal, go-big-or-go-home culture. A failure to thrive there was clearly my own failure to hack it in the world, a failure of... See more
We can fret over the wildness of the news all we want, more crazy shit can and will happen, and you are still going to get a stomach ache after eating Chipotle. The perfect mixture of breathwork, sex, psychedelics, and funky music won’t make you enlightened or clear your eczema. Your neighbor’s ratchety garage door will still throttle your white... See more
Start somewhere bad to get somewhere good. A few weeks ago, I interviewed psychologist Adam Alter about his book Anatomy of a Breakthrough . In it, he writes about the “creative cliff illusion,” the notion that good creative ideas will either come quickly or not at all. Unfortunately, our intuition has that one approximately backward. In studies of... See more
David Epstein • Pour Out Lesser Ideas to Get to Great Ones
Ah newthing, we think. I know what you are. Making you will be easy. The path is straight and sure. The newthing hears your boasts and does not react, but knows how much you have to learn. As you build the newthing you will discover that building a newthing is a strange act where the harder you go about trying to do it, the harder it becomes. It
... See moreLeave the newthing unattended too soon and you risk it serving purposes you did not intend and might not be in its best interests. Hold the controls too tightly and you risk denying the newthing what it wishes to be and where its purpose is best served.
Nature has designed various rhythms and cycles. Your heartbeat consists of contraction and recovery. Animals hibernate and migrate according to the season. Sproutlings and plants rest during the winter before shooting out again in spring. Some plants, such as Proteas, have seeds with hard shells that require mortality—the heat from fire—to break... See more
We all think what we want is answers. We don’t, actually. Answers are dead things. Questions are animating. What we want is great questions.
By the time a question gets its answer, all of the juice has been squeezed. The answer is the pulp and pith. Answers are static things. Questions are kinetic.
By the time a question gets its answer, all of the juice has been squeezed. The answer is the pulp and pith. Answers are static things. Questions are kinetic.
as far as you can manage it, you should make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world – the world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies.
I don’t love writing; I love having a problem I believe I might someday write my way out of.
