Oddments of High Unimportance

Basic things to keep in mind

Be honest with yourself about how hard you’re willing to work. One thing I noticed as a trainer and as a professor is people want to achieve something, but aren’t willing to put in the effort to get there. They say they want to work hard but when you work them hard, they run. Don’t be the person who runs. The discipline it takes to do that is uncomfortable and unpleasant sometimes and you must be willing to enter that discomfort. Look at advanced degrees: two out of three people don’t complete their PhD. It’s punishing. I’ve cried because of the stress numerous times. Every day I have to reaffirm my efforts at my dissertation, at lifting, at personal relationships. But it’s so, so worth it in the end.

Kato Lomb explained that your micro-environment (the bubble in which you live) is more important than your macro-environment (the country in which you live). In other words, what matters most is the things that you deliberately expose yourself to all the time rather than those that you come across by accident.

Don’t read a book once carefully. Read it 10 times, 100 times, sloppily.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

There is always another game on Saturday.

Lawrence Pearsall Jacks, a Unitarian minister, summed it up decades ago:

The master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his work and his play, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether his is working or playing. To himself, he is always doing both.

What is more important than happiness is involvement.  We want to be involved with our lives, other people, projects, and the creative process.  In that involvement, we will experience a range of moods, emotions, feelings from high to low.  It comes with the territory.  And, in those wonderful moments, when you are happy, it is something to appreciate for what it is, an exquisite interlude that makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

Robert Fritz

Many pro authors say you should try a dumb trick if your writing is moving frustratingly slowly: just banish a certain part of your A to Z for a bit. This paragraph can’t contain any “A”s. Try it. You find that your brain has to slow down and focus on that arbitrary limit. It distracts you, making you pick all of your words with caution.

Okay, that was just one paragraph without using the letter “E” and it took me about three hours to assemble. It’s a great writing trick because all too often, you get trapped by your own writing style. Water carves grooves in rock after a number of years, you see. When that happens, that’s becomes the only path the water wants to take. An arbitrary but ironclad rule forces your writing to flow into new directions.

In nooks all over the earth sit men who are waiting, scarcely knowing in what way they are waiting, much less that they are waiting in vain. Occasionally the call that awakens—-that accident which gives the “permission” to act—-comes too late, when the best youth and strength for action has already been used up by sitting still; and many have found to their horror when they “leaped up” that their limbs had gone to sleep and their spirit had become too heavy. “It is too late,” they said to themselves, having lost their faith in themselves and henceforth forever useless.

Friedrich Nietzsche