“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.” -Pablo Picasso
- The importance of the post-it to author Will Self’s creative process. Also in the world of creative processes of writers, James Joyce wrote most of Finnegans Wake with crayons on cardboard and Vladimir Nabokov wrote with index cards.
- Full of ideas, but short on time? Josh Spector gives us five ways to figure out which ideas to pursue. Most important to me are ideas which will allow me to succeed even if I fail. Also, it should be hell yeah, or no.
- One of my favorite quotes is from the movie Fight Club: “the things you own end up owning you.” We often get sucked into the belief that buying more stuff will result in more happiness. In the case of those things that we “need,” it can be true, but it’s rarely true in the long-term for the things that we “want.”
- What I’m watching: To continue on the theme of minimalism, I watched the documentary, Minimalism, on Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus, the brains behind The Minimalists. It’s a fantastic ode to living a better life with more simplicity, and now available on Netflix.
- Matt D’Avella, the documentary filmmaker behind Minimalism, has a short film, called Unstuck: The Five Steps to Change, releasing this month. Sign up for Matt’s mailing list to get exclusive access to his film.
- What I’m reading: Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung, a short story collection by Ajahn Brahm, a theoretical physicist turned Buddhist monk. The first story, “Two Bad Bricks,” provides an important lesson to perfectionists: often, our perception of our mistakes and imperfections blinds us.
