You’ll be glad you did
There are a great many things my past self did that my present self is decidedly not thankful for.
I won’t go into them here, but let’s just say I’ve never been great at delayed gratification. I’m inherently lazy and prone to extreme and prolonged bouts of mediocrity. No matter the endeavor, I always seem to find myself struggling to stay the course long enough to see the payoff.
It’s kind of a theme I’ve been ruminating on lately and something I’m working really hard on changing. Taking the long view. Zooming out. Developing a low time preference. …
Don’t worry about a perceived lack of progress
The term nonlinear refers to a statistical scenario where there is not a direct relationship between two variables. Meaning, changes to one of the inputs does not change the outputs in a direct, straight-line proportion. For example, a large increase in an input may only result in a marginal gain in output or vice versa.
This perfectly encapsulates the returns, financial or otherwise, one can expect to receive for their creative endeavors.
Creative returns are nonlinear.
When you sit down to write for two hours, you don’t always receive two hours of output in return: the writing may be subpar…
Talk less, smile more
There’s a point early on in Hamilton where Alexander Hamilton has the following exchange (in song form, of course) with Aaron Burr:
Burr: Can I buy you a drink?
Hamilton: That would be nice.
Burr: While we’re talking let me offer you some free advice: Talk less. Smile more. Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for.
Hamilton: You can’t be serious?
Burr: You wanna get ahead?
Hamilton: Yes.
Burr: Fools who run their mouths off wind up dead.
To end the song, Hamilton poses the following question to Aaron Burr:
If you stand for nothing, Burr…
What if…
What would happen if you stopped wasting opportunities?
What would happen if you stopped sleeping in and got out of bed a little earlier to get a jump on the day and you did that consistently for a year?
Where might you end up?
What would happen if you stuck to your writing schedule and produced a thousand or two thousand words five or six days a week? Why not seven?
What could you produce?
What would happen if you stopped drinking so much?
What might happen to your physical and mental health?
What would happen if you improve your…
An excerpt from my forthcoming (long) short story/novella
***The following is an excerpt from a (long) short story/novella I’m currently working on. It’s rough around the edges and will likely change a bit but I wanted to share this with you and get your impressions on it. In the coming weeks, I may post more. Feedback and criticism welcomed and encouraged, but please be gentle. My hope is that by posting this (and getting some feedback), I will be more motivated to actually finish the damned thing and get it published. Thank you in advance for your kindness and generosity.***
A WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING. That was how…
A simple tip from Jocko Willink to make you more a successful writer
For me, and I suspect for most writers, a successful day boils down to one single thing. It’s the thing that makes up for any other shortcomings in my day. If it’s the only thing I get accomplished the entire day, I can still lay my head on the pillow at night and sleep soundly knowing that I did the number one most important thing: I wrote.
Simple as that.
Yes, it’s a low bar.
And yet…
There are many nights where my head hits the pillow and that one thing isn’t done. I haven’t written.
I hate that. I…
It’s all about creating value, duh
When Jeff Bezos wrote his first letter to Amazon shareholders way back in 1997, the stock was trading at $1.50. Today, April 15, 2021, in his final letter to shareholders as CEO, Amazon’s stock is trading at $3,379.09. It is my firm belief that a guy who built a company up from nothing to one with a $1.7 trillion market cap is very much worth listening to. So when he speaks (or writes), I’m inclined to do just that.
While the letter is worth reading in its entirety (it’s only about a 20-minute read) there was one point that he…
A quick reminder about the importance of humor from Viktor Frankl
I am not a comedian. I wouldn’t necessarily reach for funny when compiling a list of adjectives with which to describe myself. But I can make my friends and family laugh and I consider myself to have a pretty solid sense of humor. I especially enjoy it when other people make me laugh. Therefore, I think I’m more than qualified to make some generalizations about the state of humor in America.
From where I sit, it seems we’ve completely lost our sense of humor and have regressed into a country of pissed off, overly sensitive whiners who take themselves way…
So before you start burning bridges…maybe don’t
At some point, if you’re lucky, you’ll find yourself staring back into a past that stretches across several decades. For those counting, that’s a lot of years. It’s a great many days comprised of hours that tick by fast and slow. Minutes spent bored or enthralled, engaged or checked out. Seconds flashing in a pan before burning out and passing us by, gone forever. It’s quite simply, a vast expanse of time. Relatively speaking, of course.
A human life is an extensive portfolio of memories and emotions. Weddings and funerals. Birthdays and holidays. Love lost and love won. Triumphs and…
A thought to contemplate
History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes, as the saying goes. And while human history is certainly ugly and replete with too many instances deserving of repudiation and condemnation, it is nonetheless chock full of lessons worth learning and pitfalls worth avoiding.
In other words, we shouldn’t simply try to erase it and make the mistake of believing we’ve reached the pinnacle of progress and have nothing left to learn. We should instead grapple with every unpleasant inch of it and practice acceptance because there are things worth remembering. Things that might just save us from ourselves.
Tom Belskie
technical writer by day | indie author & blogger by night
