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You aren’t famous. Anything you do or create will probably receive little to no attention, so stop optimizing for a non-existent audience and instead

Sometimes the source of frustration is external; sometimes it’s internal. The specifics change, but there will always be something. I bet you wish the

Seeenough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning whenthe world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only goingthrough the moti

I don’t talk about it much but I do work at Google and I just want to contribute, as a small addendum to the wider conversation about AI, and how much

“Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick arch

through curiosity can reveal people to themselves. But formal education largely remains a vocational enterprise in which, Sir Ken argues, we are being

"You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whe

they would like to do for its own sake and not because their fathers did it. Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or eve

The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choi

Make a list of the things you will never do in your writing space. Keep that list handy, right beside your computer. 2. Make a list of the things you

Because you have shielded your writing time, you just need to sit down and open a new document. All of the mental energy you would have used to figure

In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently there must be some little quality of fierceness

IF WE BETTER UNDERSTOOD MEMORY AND IMAGINATION we might discover that memory is in part the way that persistent productive obsessions recombine instan

Certain productive obsessions are bound to thread their way through your life, appearing here as a theme in the novel you write, there as the destinat

You may produce fewer paintings or novels if you get in the habit of controlling your obsessions, but what you lose in inventory you gain in mental he

You do not want to go too long without a productive obsession in place, since that will mean that you won’t really be thinking.