So my point is that you can learn about yourself by seeing what you focus on day to day. That’s what you’re going to do well in. And the stuff you hate thinking about? That’s the part that will never improve.

I once interviewed Tiziana Casciaro, professor at Harvard Business School. She does research on social skills in the workplace. Midway through the interview, I started to panic and I asked her how I could tell if I have terrible social skills.

She told me that it’s nearly impossible to judge one’s own social skills. But there’s one good way: Measure the amount you care about your social skills. If you care, and think about ways to make them better on a daily basis, you probably have decent social skills.

This is true for most things in life: It doesn’t matter so much exactly what action you choose in working toward improvement, it just matters that you’re trying, with genuine intention. The common problem is not wrong action so much as it is no focus.

It’s no accident that election races and and military battles are both called campaigns.

I asked if there were any photographs of my father as a boy because I’ve never seen one, but was told my grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s, had burned all her albums shortly before she died. In the only picture I have of my dad as a child, his face is turned tantalisingly away from the camera.

Deprived of Ground

It’s important to feel I’m running my work instead of letting it run me; so I’ve forced myself to get into the habit of daily meditation for 30 minutes in the mornings, even on days when I’m itching to get on with things. Meditation isn’t a productivity tool, but the productivity benefits of stopping and putting things in perspective every day are huge.

Mastery is Well-Informed Improvisation

A cleareyed Malcolm Gladwell discusses the American penchant for reducing all activity to a moral lesson that can be imparted through the powerful cocktail of stage presence and rear-screen projection. Drawing a line from Benjamin Franklin to the homilies printed on Celestial Seasonings tea boxes, Mr. Gladwell says that even knotty concepts from fields like quantum physics and philology can be made attractive to large groups of people if the concepts are rendered as anecdotes involving a cabdriver, a small child or an obscure Flemish botanist. “Start with a personal anecdote,” Mr. Gladwell suggests, “and then extrapolate to the 18th-century cocoa trade in Malta.”

It is so hard to change behavior and to face oneself honestly. This author has my total admiration. I used to work with a woman who had a brain injury and dealt with it by reciting to herself the very true mantra “everyone has SOME deficit,” which is very true. And this author has made me twist that to “everyone has SOME addiction.”

Plato could have warned me. In “The Republic,” he advises “temperance” in physical training, likening it to learning music and poetry. Keep it “simple and flexible,” as in all things, don’t overdo. Follow this course, and you will remain “independent of medicine in all but extreme cases.”

Hospital managers at Gloucestershire NHS Trust (in 2001) and the catering staff at Flintshire County Council (in 2009) renamed the pudding Spotted Richard on menus because of the use of the word dick in the original name, a common dysphemism for male genitalia in the English language. Gloucestershire NHS Trust restored the original name in 2002. Flintshire County Council reversed their renaming after a few weeks.

Doris Betts cut to the chase. To those of us engaged in writing the Great American Novel, she would say, “That’s lovely. Now how will you go about earning a living?”

n an excerpted interview published in The News & Observer in 1994, Betts talked about her book and explained that it was an exploration of how God can allow the innocent to suffer.

“I always am interested in whether or not you can deal with what I think of as the big questions at the level of ordinary working people. It seems to me that that’s essential in fiction in America,” she said. “If you really want to ask the questions that Job asked, why shouldn’t you ask them of a highway patrolman, a beautician, a shoe salesman at Belk’s …?”

Kirby Crackle (a 4CP re-run)

Either way, characters needs quests, drives, flaws and set-backs.

neil-gaiman:

Kentucky. They were sad to see me go.

View more Neil Gaiman on WhoSay

In the overworld, the elements are: Talk to people, wander around, try new things, listen, and *gradually* gain focus on what to do next.

Characters

Sometimes you have to stop worrying, wondering, and doubting. Have faith that things will work out, maybe not how you planned, but just how it’s meant to be.

The hardest part about growing is letting go of what you were used to, and moving on with something you’re not.

You don’t really need to worry about concentrating per se. As long as you put in the time, you can be as mentally distracted as you *want.* The concentration will eventually just “kick in” after a few days of doing it. I am very distractible by nature, so I know what I am talking about.

Of course, there are ways of removing distractions, like turning off your phone or email while you are working. You can deliberately avoid multi-tasking if that is helpful. What I am saying is that you don’t have to worry about the concentration per se. Regularity of working habits is the main remedy, not some internal concentration mojo that must be cultivated on its own terms. In this way concentration is similar to inspiration: neither has to exist before the work happens.