“What are the causes of success? …studies suggest that our most important talent is having a talent for working hard, for practicing even when practice isn’t fun…. Success is never easy. That’s why talent requires grit.”
Jonah Lehrer
Archives for 2011
Lamb House
Lamb House was the home of Henry James from 1897, when he was 55, until his death in 1916. Below, the residence as it appeared in the late 1930s or early 1940s. To the left of the house, at the end of the high wall, is the garden room where in summer James did most of his writing. The garden room was destroyed by a bomb in August 1940.
Look here for more about Lamb House from Colm Toibin, whose portrait of Henry James, The Master, beautifully evokes James’s life at Lamb House. If you read The Master — and you should — you will want to know what Lamb House looks like.
Photos: Jim Linwood, doveson2008, both via Flickr.
The Master
Henry James, age 63
Rye, England, 1906
Photogravure by Alvin Langdon Coburn, 1882-1966
Talking Heads: Life During Wartime
From Stop Making Sense, 1984. Almost 30 years ago — ouch.
San Francisco, 1906
San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906 (via Shorpy).
Ted Williams, 1939
Photo by Arthur Griffin. (via)
The origin of Roy Hobbs
Phillies first-baseman Eddie Waitkus, Clearwater, Florida, 3/9/53 (source). On June 19, 1949, Waitkus was shot in the chest by a deranged fan, Ruth Ann Steinhagen, in a Chicago hotel room. The incident inspired the similar episode in Bernard Malamud’s The Natural.
We built it for ourselves
We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
Steve Jobs, 1985 (via)