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Choose the frame
There are a hundred interpretations to each event in your life. Choose the one that is the most useful to you. This frame should be consistent with your values, make you feel proud, and energize you. Look for metaphors to help you make sense of it. Practice it every day. Thank you BJ Miller for…
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Don’t open the app, open your journal instead
Buy a paper journal. It can be the cheapest one from a convenience store, it can be a beautiful leather bound one, it can be a structured one with guidance and prompts—whichever makes you feel better. It just needs to have space that you can write in. The next time you get an urge to…
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A setback is a good opportunity…
To choose optimism. When things are going well, it’s easy to feel optimistic. The momentum can practically carry you away. It’s when things aren’t going well, that’s the real opportunity—a game rep—to actually practice optimism in three ways: If you can seize this moment, you can seize the next one as well.
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Keeping this blog a main thing
Writing at this blog is a good source of energy for the rest of my life. When I write this blog, I do better at the rest of the stuff—my work and business, my family, etc. Sometimes, I want to promote my writing. I want to make a newsletter, more posts at LinkedIn or Medium,…
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Creative lineage
You and your work are not on an island. You are part of a tradition—the most recent people to join a party that started decades, maybe centuries or millennia ago. Who came before you? What work came before your work? “For me music has always been about lineage,” Philip Glass writes in his memoir, Words…
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Three ways to learn taste
Martin Scorsese approached filmmaking by having one of his archivists record videos of films and live TV with multiple VCRs, and cataloging them into a system. He ended up with thousands of these videos. You will approach your work with the same kind of obsessiveness, though perhaps to a smaller degree. You will research meticulously,…