A smart, funny, quick TED talk by the author of huge hit Eat, Pray, Love (UK book and film, US book and film) – and specifically about how you have to keep creating, how you need to survive both success and failure. She has a particularly thought-provoking idea about what she calls going home to your creativity.
Writer Ken Armstrong's weekly blog this time covers the technological way to feel like you're not doing enough. Or anything. He has a Sky+ box and:
…now, alas, my beloved box seemed to have turned on me. It has become, for me at least, a whole new way to underachieve. It’s over there now, taunting me. I can feel its red eye upon me.
Just read it. And the go read the Ken Armstrong Writing Stuff every week. Like I do.
I have a bad opinion of myself. You can't tell because I write books, I do a lot of talks, I run this news website: plainly I have an ego. But you can probably guess. I'm a writer, the collective noun for us is neuroses. Sometimes this opinion of me gets in my way and I wrote recently about how criticising oneself in the third person is surprisingly more successful than doing it the usual “I bollocksed-up there” way. (I liked that post a lot: Must Do Better.) Now there's more.
Now there's the idea that you just change yourself to fix this bad opinion:
Let’s say you want to become the type of person who never misses a workout. (If you believed that about yourself, how much easier would it be to get in shape?) Every time you choose to do a workout — even if it’s only 5 minutes — you’re casting a vote for this new identity in your mind. Every action is a vote for the type of person you want to become.
How to Change Your Beliefs and Stick to Your Goals for Good – James Clear
It's not the greatest of reads – Lifehacker's coverage of it is better – but try the full post.
Getting up, for one. Probably eating. Exercise if necessary. But then also at least something, just something of whatever you're working on:
NO ZERO DAYS. A zero day is the day when you don’t do a single thing towards your goal.
Its 11.58pm and feel like you didn’t do anything? Do that one pushup. Write that sentence. Read one page.
You may say its not much but hey, its not a zero. 1 is much much better than a zero. Zero is your enemy. Fight it, ruthlessly.
It's similar to the Jerry Seinfeld Technique (now famously denied by Seinfeld who says he has no idea where it came from or why it's named after him) and it's similar to my own Bad Days advice. So that's three people or three entire philosophies in agreement: can it possibly be wrong?
I had 200 unsolicited submissions when I was features editor on a magazine and I rejected 199 of them. This one would’ve made it 198: this is so much how a terrific writer should and did pitch that I’m recommending it to you even though it failed.
Eighty-one years on, I hope The New Yorker magazine is ashamed of its stupidity.
March 15, 1933
Gentlemen,
I suppose you’d be more interested in even a sleight-o’-hand trick than you’d be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can’t have the thing you want most.
I am 23 years old, six weeks on the loose in N.Y. However, I was a New Yorker for a whole year in 1930–31 while attending advertising classes in Columbia’s School of Business. Actually I am a southerner, from Mississippi, the nation’s most backward state. Ramifications include Walter H. Page, who, unluckily for me, is no longer connected with Doubleday-Page, which is no longer Doubleday-Page, even. I have a B.A.(’29) from the University of Wisconsin, where I majored in English without a care in the world. For the last eighteen months I was languishing in my own office in a radio station in Jackson, Miss., writing continuities, dramas, mule feed advertisements, santa claus talks, and life insurance playlets; now I have given that up.
As to what I might do for you — I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15¢ movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse’s pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. That shows you how my mind works — quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards.
Since I have bought an India print, and a large number of phonograph records from a Mr. Nussbaum who picks them up, and a Cezanne Bathers one inch long (that shows you I read e. e. cummings I hope), I am anxious to have an apartment, not to mention a small portable phonograph. How I would like to work for you! A little paragraph each morning — a little paragraph each night, if you can’t hire me from daylight to dark, although I would work like a slave. I can also draw like Mr. Thurber, in case he goes off the deep end. I have studied flower painting.
There is no telling where I may apply, if you turn me down; I realize this will not phase you, but consider my other alternative: the U of N.C. offers for $12.00 to let me dance in Vachel Lindsay’s Congo. I congo on. I rest my case, repeating that I am a hard worker.
Truly yours,
Eudora Welty
From Letters of Note (UK edition, US edition) via Brainpickings
The artist and latterly Doctor Who star Vincent knew his onions about being productive and creative:
Get started: Don’t wait for everything to be perfect. “Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile,” said van Gogh.
Do the work: Commit to your goals and go through the motions to achieve it – whether the outcome is good or bad. Vincent van Gogh believed if you do nothing, you are nothing.
Work for yourself: The longer you work and figure things out for yourself, the more active your brain becomes. An active brain is a more creative brain.
That’s paraphrased Van Gogh. Paraphrased twice over: 99U writer Stephanie Kaptein has a piece examining Think Jar Collective with creativity author Michael Michalko who in turn examined the work ethic of artist Vincent van Gogh. Do go follow the rabbit hole into more and more detail about this.
They found it by accident. I had gone to the doctor for a routine penile enlargement procedure. I had filled out the standard Writers Guild insurance forms, and that’s where it turned up. When my doctor walked into the room, she had a hard time making eye contact.
“We won’t be enlarging your penis today,” she started, haltingly.
Ordinarily, she spoke with such clinical reserve. But this was different, personal. “When we looked at your paperwork, something seemed off. I took the liberty of sending it to a lab,” she continued. “Andy… your writing… it’s almost a hundred percent shit.”
How Writing for the TV Show “Community” Cured Me – Andy Bobrow – Medium (14 May 2014)
Writer Andy Bobrow naturally writes very well about writing very badly – and what little you can do about that – in the full piece.
If there is one good thing about me, it is I am saintly about admitting when I’m wrong and truly Godly about changing my mind when you persuade me. Admittedly, I do it because you cannot believe how it throws people. Yes, I can look like a fool, but whoa, their faces. Love it.
However, I am unusual. Brainpickings.org looks at the issues of changing one’s mind and in particular how one book talks about it:
David McRaney explores [this] in You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself [UK edition, US edition] — a fascinating and pleasantly uncomfortable-making look at why “self-delusion is as much a part of the human condition as fingers and toes,” and the follow-up to McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart, one of the best psychology books of 2011. McRaney writes of this cognitive bug:
“Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do this instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions instead. Over time, the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.”
But what makes this especially worrisome is that in the process of exerting effort on dealing with the cognitive dissonance produced by conflicting evidence, we actually end up building new memories and new neural connections that further strengthen our original convictions.
I fancy the book now but Brainpickings writer Maria Popova writes an interesting piece about this.
There’s an overwhelming amount of happiness research. Forget incorporating it all into your life — merely remembering it is daunting enough. I like to keep it simple: Remember the 4 P’s.
Purpose
Perspective
People
PlayWork those into every day and you’ll be smiling more.
Ye-ess… I’m listening… tell me more.
I want to tell you this:
Being a bully may be good for your health, study finds
Children who bully others have lower levels of inflammation later in life
Childhood bullying has been linked to a number of physical and mental health effects, including lower self-worth, depression, and serious illnesses later in life. But until now, researchers had largely focused on examining these effects in victims of abuse, not the bullies themselves. This may soon change, as a long-term study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was able to demonstrate that “pure bullies,” people who have never experienced bullying themselves, do in fact face a long-lasting health effect from abusing others. As it turns out, that effect is actually beneficial — even when compared to people who aren’t involved in bullying at all.
Because I want to show you this:
Though do go pay some cash to the Frasier folk now, okay? The show is available on DVD.