Rob Tourtelot
@rtourtelot
Rob Tourtelot
If you’re not sure about the level of stakes in your story, simply ask yourself: • Would the audience want to hear my next sentence? • If I stopped speaking right now, would anyone care? • Am I more compelling than video games and pizza and sex at this moment?
Dan Kennedy • Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling
We often disapprove of parts of our lives without really examining them—it’s like never going into certain rooms of your house. But meditation allows all the voices and all the images into the room. When we open the invisible doors, we can come to rest in the life we have; we can love it as it is instead of waiting for a shinier version. Every day
... See moreJohn Tarrant • Enlightenment Is Something We Do Together
Ordinary means that there is no need to add or take away from what is going on in the mind. Each portion of life has the whole of life. There is nothing wrong with what is in the mind except the sense that something is wrong. In this way simplicity turns to a form of compassion.
John Tarrant • Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life
“3 tips for getting started as a writer:
1. Publish on a schedule. Consistency develops ability.
2. Share your writing publicly. Writing is a magnet. It attracts like-minded people.
3. Write about what fascinates you. You don't need to be an expert. Curiosity leads to expertise.”
1. Publish on a schedule. Consistency develops ability.
2. Share your writing publicly. Writing is a magnet. It attracts like-minded people.
3. Write about what fascinates you. You don't need to be an expert. Curiosity leads to expertise.”
James Clear • 3 Ideas, 2 Quotes, 1 Question (January 16, 2020) | James Clear
We will benefit from giving ourselves and others the benefit of the doubt as we navigate our understanding of ourselves and of others. We need to reach for grace as we weave in and out of what is me and what is you, and what is us.
Notes & Highlights for How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong
Just tell your story. All of it. Forget the strategies. Start in the wrong place and end in the long place. Ramble. The goal is to return to that moment as best as possible in order to find its meaning.
Dan Kennedy • Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which ... See more
A quote from The White Album
Thus our strange relationship with the pain of grief. In the early days, we wish only for it to end; later on, we fear that it will. And when it finally does begin to ease, it also does not, because, at first, feeling better can feel like loss, too.
Maria Popova • Losing Love, Finding Love, and Living with the Fragility of It All
An enlightened being sees their agony without diminishing its reality. In other words, it doesn’t just turn away from it—but, on the other hand, simultaneously sees everything, including that agony [and] including hell, actually, as bubbles of bliss in an ocean of bliss. That’s the kind of cognitive dissonance that the ordinary mind cannot get arou... See more