Rajashree Gandhi

art that makes you want to quit is actually art that makes you want to continue to do it

I think of writing a lot like walking. It’s rarely the most popular, the most effective, or the most efficient way of getting to your destination. I don’t always want to do it, and it’s not always technically enjoyable; sometimes it’s boring or slow, sometimes it’s tiring and pointless, sometimes it’s cold or wet or windy and I’m retracing the same... See more

More and more, I think my issues with conventional productivity advice – indeed, with the very notion of productivity – boil down to this: Spending your days trying to get through a list of things you feel you have to do is a fundamentally joyless and soul-destroying way to live; and most productivity problems, like distraction or procrastination o... See more

You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will... See more

One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one.