Mei

Lately, when I’m stuck on a piece, I will print everything I’ve written and re-read it with a pair of scissors in hand. As I go, I will cut out the pieces that feel like they’re working: a phrase here, a sentence there, entire paragraphs if I’m lucky. Then I’ll lay out all the cut-out pieces on my desk and move them around, trying to find the right... See more

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead

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Stop treating knowledge work as manual work. Instead of measuring success by irrelevant or arbitrary metrics, ask yourself, Did I contribute today?

Did you advance the conversation? Did you solve a problem? Did you come up with a good idea? Did you help a colleague or a client?

A think-in-bio is like giving others an API for your mind.

Even in the whorl of our own personal tragedies, when the cosmos appears at its most chaotic and impartial, I have come to see the world, in its complexity, rearranging itself toward meaning.

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

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