Sublime

pitiless.

“My notebook is the microbial fungus of ideas and images I draw on when I’m writing,” he said when we first spoke.

It felt like the punchline: to see now, so clearly, the way he had turned the people in his life into characters. He’d picked the narrative, then fit people, in his experience of them, to reinforce it. What if you don’t do that anymore? he thought.

“His name was Horatio Brown. A throwback,” I said, smiling at the memory. “The type who kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk. Smoked three packs a day. Would occasionally flip through a thick file of his favorite dirty photos that he’d snapped on the job. Believed, as a physical rule of the universe, that every client was lying to him. In that, I’v

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. Burkeman highlights Robert Boice, a psychology professor who studies the various habits and routines of writers. His research uncovered something counterintuitive and revelatory. Writers who made writing a smaller, shorter part of their day were decidedly more productive and succe

In other words, he had finally worked his way up to the lowest spot on the totem pole.