Michael Brooks

Life/Career advice:  Don’t tie your identity to something that can be taken away from you.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push... See more

Timbre is that unique sound quality of an instrument bestowed by the wood or metal chosen. Articles have timbre too. Writers imbue their creations with subtitles, comma choices, and inflections that bear their unique signature.

An easy way to increase the size of that signature is to pack your subtitles with opinion . Rather than simply use them to... See more

here is a technique I’ve used with success:

Step 1: identify the versions of yourself most responsible for bad behavior. Assign them names, describe the circumstances where and when they exist and write out their tendencies.

Step 2: list what decisions they are authorized to make, i.e. can they decide whether or not to consume alcohol past 5pm or has... See more

The mismatch between past and present doesn’t seem trivial to me — if the “you” of today can so blithely disregard the “you” of yesterday, then it follows that the “you” I’m talking to now might very well not be the one who shows up for our date tomorrow. There’s a kind of unpredictable change that seems to lie outside of the virtues of growth and... See more