The Big Thing

We may be too shy to tell other people about our creative goal, so no one even knows to expect something.

Today we are pressured by social media to present an artificial self, in the form of posts and tweets, YouTube videos, and Instagrams. Some people mold and remold their online selves, the better to receive likes and thumbs-up, tweets, and other forms of approval.

139 “Kafka’s job, while imposing an onerous routine”: Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984), 174–75

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen; The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern; and Wool, by Hugh Howey.

have come to realize that the most important thing to do in order to finish a big creative project is this: understand what motivates you, and create a structure to support th

y recent research, would gradually become automatic and then be off-loaded to my basal ganglia in the form of a habit.
But app

rong.
How much better a book would this have been if I gotten up every single day from 7 to 9 a.m. to work on it, and again in the evening from 9 to 10?
That had been my fantasy at the start of this project. Instead, on many, many mornings, despite having planned, even vowed, to work on the book, I lolled in my bed, played with my cat, read a Scandinavian mystery, and fell back asleep.
Beautiful wisps of sentences appeared in my head as I lay in bed. I must write them down, I thought, but not yet. It felt so good to lie down, basking in the potential of my words.
And then, once I got up, there were things I needed to check: my email, my Facebook, my Twitter account, the papers, Match.com. After I had done all these things, it would be time to go to work, or, if it was the weekend, to go back to bed and read.

power of increments, no matter how erratically they may accrue

Masters and Young Geniuses

mber carrying around Sartre’s Being and Nothingness,