Mickey Patel

An empty white page is a mirror into your mind. When the ideas in your mind are clouded, so are the words on the page in front of you. Re-writing is re-thinking. It’s the best single best way to sharpen your ideas. And once your ideas are as clear as a Neiman Marcus mirror, you’ll be able to teach them to others.

So the point is to take the work seriously but you don’t take yourself too seriously. There’s a riff about this in Stephen Pressfield’s War of Art, where he talks about how amateurs are too precious with their work: “The professional has learned, however, that too much love can be a bad thing. Too much love can make him choke. The seeming detachmen

You can be very clever, erudite, but if you want to find a way of action that is totally different, that will give a bliss to life, you must understand the whole machinery of thinking, and in the very understanding of what is positive, which is thought, you enter into a different dimension of action, which is essentially love. That means to enquire

Master, what about pursuits such as in sports, business, the performing arts . . . Are prescriptions equally poisonous in those domains. M: Yes. S: But there is a technique to those things, is there not. M: There are indeed some mechanical elements. Such as physical technique. And, as they apply to a mechanical element, prescriptions may be of some

Make a story for the things you want to remember. Never make a story for the things you want to forget. Let those disappear with time. Your memories are a mix of fact and fiction. Your story about an experience overwrites your memory of the actual experience. So use this in your favor. Re-write your past. Embellish adventures. Disempower trauma. Re

So the way to live is to ignore everything new. All of it. Let the test of time filter everything. Value only what has endured. Ignore all marketing and advertising. Nobody is pushing what really matters. Friendships, nature, family, learning, community. The best things in life aren’t things.