“The genre matters”

– Seth Godin, on the Tim Ferris Podcast #728

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“Genre is a minimum-security prison.”

– David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

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My blog’s genre is clear.

It’s based on engaging with quotations.

A reaction against the random sharing of quotes online without context.

Every day the format is identical. You know what you are getting.

Two quotes of others, with my commentary.

There is power and confidence in being clear in what you are creating, and why.

But genre is a framework, not a law.

It is easy to break out.

In theory.

Yet the more I write in this framework, the harder it becomes to want to escape.

I am comforted in my cell.

It becomes increasingly familiar.

I have everything I need.

However, this blog is a genre I visit every day, not where I live.

It’s not representative of the whole me, just the part I choose to share.

There is safety in that separation.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed your visit.

That you meet the same person every day.

“It’s not enough to have inner discipline. We also need to follow an outer discipline—a system of principles and behaviors—to channel our energies, thoughts, and emotions productively. A system that adds some structure to the constantly changing flux of information that we interact with every day.”

– Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain

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“Imagine if, early in our schooling or career, we learned a system to organize ourselves and manage our work. We could carry this system with us no matter where we worked or what we did for a living—be we contractor or teacher, salesperson or doctor. And with this system we would have a code to guide our conduct; techniques to help us channel our energies, thoughts, and emotions productively; and the means to get through a tough workload and deliver with excellence.”

– Dan Charnas, Work Clean

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I’m like a bag with everything just shoved in.

Everything loose in the bag: pens, pencils, books, ideas, phones, keys.

It’s all a big jumble.

So when it’s time to get something out of the bag, I have to root around in there.

I don’t really know what I’ve got in the bag at any given time.

Some people will be very organised and have things in specific pockets, have a bag within a bag, items organised together.

It makes it easier for them to access what they need.

Without a system, I am chaotic and I’m not quite sure what I’m going to be pulling out every time I put my hand in.

So it’s this process of trying to develop my own organisation, how I carry myself around.

How do I access myself my thoughts?

My feelings?

My ideas, better than then I do now?

How do you pack for your life?

It’s a question that will reward a lifetime of exploration…

“For only that book can we read which relates to me something that is already in my mind.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson (as quoted in First We Read Then We Write by Robert D. Richardson)

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“Every reader is—when he is reading—the reader of his own self,”

– Marcel Proust.” (As quoted in How to Be an Artist by Jerry Saltz)

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I am not likely to tackle Marcel Proust directly.

I rely on getting at his wisdom second hand.

I’m never going to find all the good ideas that have been written down.

It’s nice to discover something new.

I’m happy for someone else to do the digging for me sometimes.

Books are chosen by my subconscious.

I have dozens of books that have been purchased but unread.

I can only read what I need right now.

A mirror polished.

An itch scratched.

“If you’re an aspiring artist, I want you to remember: Nothing happens if you’re not working. But anything can happen when you are.”

– Jerry Saltz, How to Be an Artist

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“After all, someone has to do your work, and you’re the closest person around.”

– David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear

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Work isn’t just what we do for others.

Work is what we do for ourselves.

Even if we love to create, it’s still work.

It’s not the idea, it’s the action.

And it feels great having worked today, knowing it awaits our attention again tomorrow.

“When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange – we’re so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.”

– Ray Bradbury, Zen and the Art of Writing

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“Hard to develop the silence and humility necessary for creating good art it you are always yelling “look at me” like a three-year-old who has just shit in the sandbox.”

– Jim Harrison, From the Dalva Notebooks, Just Before Dark

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Fortunately for me no one reads this blog.

Only a handful of people know if it’s existence.

Yet I publish here very day.

I must not be motivated by the attention of others.

This “public” space is for me to listen to what is within.

I can’t help reading and thinking and writing.

If this body of work remains undiscovered that is fine.

If a tree falls and no one hears it does it make a sound?

Who cares.

I am concerned with the planting of trees.

“Yet I have come to understand that resistance has many faces and continues long after the fighting has stopped. Scholars struggle to preserve history by writing books, archivists create museums to raise consciousness, memoirists bear witness, reopening old wounds in the belief that in pain is the preservation of memory. Keeping faith, it can be said, is yet another form of resistance. Meanwhile songwriters and novelists (and filmmakers too) dramatize events of long ago, believing their art can bring the dead to life, if for only an hour or two in our imagination.”

– Ed Zwick, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions

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“However it was not in his nature to think negatively. Hope lay in positive action.”

Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

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We don’t wait for hope, we create hope.

In doing something, we resist the entropy of our joys.

We cannot sit and wait for the good things to happen.

They happen through action.

It creates a positive charge.

We are powered though another day.

“The notes from one to the next frequently had little in common. They jumped from topic to topic, and only in places were sequentially narrative. So I always rolled the platen and left blank space after each item to accommodate the scissors that were fundamental to my advanced methodology. After reading and rereading the typed notes and then developing the structure and then coding the notes accordingly in the margins and then photocopying the whole of it, I would go at the copied set with the scissors, cutting each sheet into slivers of varying size.”

– John McPhee, Draft No.4

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“The details that I hoped would make you, a reader, feel as if you’d been in the room. Then I typed my notes up, used scissors and Scotch tape, took the notes apart, and rearranged them in chronological order so they told the story you just read. And so they focused on the passion points, the imprinting moments.”

– Howard Bloom, Einstein, Michael Jackson and Me

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There is romance in longing for the pre digital methods of literary construction.

A typewriter.

Notecards.

Scissors.

Scotch tape.

But analog is not better.

It’s a method.

Today I have more tools to hand.

I can cut and paste in my iPhone.

What I like about John and Howard’s method is the idea of rearranging.

That once words are committed to the page they can be moved around.

Our ideas are not fixed in the chronology of their creation.

We create the order

Like gods with scissors, ruling over a kingdom of words.

“There’s no way to logically prove that you’re on the right path, but there is a way to live that allows you to sense its existence. The key is to train yourself to feel that whatever is happening to you right now is what’s supposed to be happening, even if it isn’t what you think you want. Each event in your life is personally meaningful because it belongs uniquely to you. This sense of meaning gives you the strength to then take the next step on your path, which is the only thing within your control.”

– Phil Stutz, Lessons for Living

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“The pathless path is an alternative to the default path. It is an embrace of uncertainty and discomfort. It’s a call to adventure in a world that tells us to conform. For me, it’s also a gentle reminder to laugh when things feel out of control and trusting that an uncertain future is not a problem to be solved.”

– Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path

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Taking a meaningful step means you are on your own path.

If you are being pushed and pulled by others then you are on their path.

It may feel lonely if we walk our own path.

We don’t exactly know the destination.

But we choose the journey.

Life becomes an adventure rather than an obligation.

We express our feeedom with every step.

“It is not usually the overpowering experience which sets off a flow of thought. Some trivial incident or even a mere word may pull the trigger. Hence the fact that a second-rate book may be more stimulating than a masterpiece.

– Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront

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“It’s an axiom that good books make bad movies, but bad books have a shot at becoming good ones. And then there’s the middle ground of books that contain underdeveloped seeds, which perceptive filmmakers can nurture into something that transcends the original without detracting from it.”

– Nat Segaloff, Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God

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I like to to think of generating new ideas as riffing of an existing beat.

I have thoughts as a counterbeat to a passage I’m reading, or a conversation, or a song.

I often depend on external sources, perhaps you could say distractions, to help my own mind focus.

An idea may be generated during reading and I am not even aware of it until my mind starts offering it to the surface of my thoughts.

I like to look in the neglected corners of published books to find my gems.

If you read what everyone else is reading you are unlikely to have as many original thoughts.

But if you read widely then you stimulate conversations between authors who never met.

Until you introduced them.

I introduced Mr Hoffer and Mr Segaloff.

I like our conversation.

“To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep.”

– The Byrds, Turn! Turn! Turn!

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“Without realizing it, I had routinely been opting for what I have come to think of as “youth implants.” This new old-age credo was everywhere I looked. If someone even casually mentioned that she was getting on in years, she was immediately chastened: “You’re not old. You’re still in your prime!” She was informed that “Seventy is the new fifty.” She was admonished not to “give in” to old age. This creed urges people my age to keep setting new goals, to charge ahead into new ventures, to design new programs for self-improvement. We are advised that medicine and its promise of an extended life span have given us an unprecedented opportunity: we can spin out the prime of our lives indefinitely. And if we surrender to old age, we are fools or, worse, cowards.”

– Daniel Klein, Travels With Epictetus

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A recent announcement: 57 year old Mike Tyson will fight a 27 year old boxer.

Tyson, a former champion, is old enough to be his opponent’s dad.

It made me reflect on the seasons of life.

Do we need to be in indefinite competition with the world?

Or is it better to define for ourselves when we need to compete and when it is time to step back.

A time for everything.

If the time has passed to compete, we can transition to teach.

Teaching is sharing.

Competing is trying to take away from another.

To strive indefinitely is to deny reality.

Wisdom requires self knowledge and acceptance.

At what age is it appropriate to check our ego at the door?