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Recommended Reading

Jonah Lehrer: Grit

September 7, 2011

“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

Read the essay here. (Follow-up here.)

Filed Under: Creativity, Recommended Reading, Writing Tagged With: grit, Jonah Lehrer

Orwell: Why I Write

October 14, 2010

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

George Orwell, “Why I Write“

Filed Under: Recommended Reading, Writing Tagged With: George Orwell, quotes for writers

James Surowiecki: Later

October 4, 2010

A theory of procrastination:

“… the person who makes plans and the person who fails to carry them out are not really the same person: they’re different parts of what the game theorist Thomas Schelling called ‘the divided self.’ Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves not as unified selves but as different beings, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control.… The idea of the divided self, though discomfiting to some, can be liberating in practical terms, because it encourages you to stop thinking about procrastination as something you can beat by just trying harder. Instead, we should rely on what Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson, in their essay in The Thief of Time, call ‘the extended will’ — external tools and techniques to help the parts of our selves that want to work. A classic illustration of the extended will at work is Ulysses’ decision to have his men bind him to the mast of his ship. Ulysses knows that when he hears the Sirens he will be too weak to resist steering the ship onto the rocks in pursuit of them, so he has his men bind him, thereby forcing him to adhere to his long-term aims.”

Anybody got a mast I can borrow for the next couple of weeks?

Filed Under: Productivity, Recommended Reading Tagged With: James Surowiecki, procrastination, The New Yorker

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