Happiness: 10 Years of Day-on-Day Obsession
One of my heroes, Austin Kleon, writes of seriousness versus lightness:
Stay at it, but stay light. Don’t be afraid to do what comes naturally. Fight the urge to be serious. Don’t let it destroy the very thing that makes you you.
(Photo via VisualHunt)
Learnings over the last week:
But the real lesson is how to minimise TIME on 1. and how to minimise TIME getting from 1. to 2. In other words, let me stop wasting TIME. Strangely enough, what is needed is energetic abandon (collect the data faster, without fussing) and courage (don’t shy from the analysis and early drafting).
Three days ago I bemoaned frittered effort. Yesterday I concluded that wastage was necessary. Have I mentioned what a frolic this is?
A couple of days ago, I confessed that I’d mucked up work on some early history. If only I’d seen the truth so much earlier, think of how much work would have been saved . . . If only magical insight had seized me . . . But of course that’s not how it works. You need to absorb the past, cut it up into little bits, reassemble them in your mind, and bingo, insight lumbers in.
I’ve continued to reflect on my extract a couple of days ago from a haunting call to action for writers. Here are more words from that Eric Maisel newsletter piece (“A writer’s pledge”):
We writers—all of us, really—are capable of speaking. Mustn’t we? I do not think it is indulgent of us to write other things. But I do think it is massively indulgent of us to not sometimes write engaged things that scare us to write and that we fear may come with consequences. We must make some beautiful things in the service of liberty and in defense of our children. We do not have to do this day and night but certainly by some occasional dawn’s early light. We are called to this, aren’t we?
I pored over dusty ancient reports, official histories, participants’ memories . . . Took notes. Fashioned my notes into a chronological “catch-all” document. I stepped back and pondered what had been collected and then fashioned a “plot,” a sensible causal sequence of “what happened” way back then. Right now, I’m writing up what the world did with radioactive waste management in the early years. It’s important because this predetermines what we’re doing now. I write . . . and damn, it’s crystal clear that throughout all that labour, I’d missed the damned point!
In his weekly newsletter, Eric Maisel a few days back featured a piece called “A writer’s pledge.” Here are some call-to-action words: “I don’t believe that you are obliged to give up writing your memoir, mystery, or textbook but aren’t you obliged to supplement that writing, which has its reasons, with some engaged writing that supports our shared desire to defeat tyrants?” (Image from website)
Ten aspects of organising how to do your creative stuff, be it part time or fulltime. I’m not good at #5 (“Organizing each day”) or #6 (“Thinking in three-month increments”). As usual, Eric Maisel nails it.
