“‘(Reporter) Do you view this season as a failure?’

‘That’s the wrong question. There’s no failure in sports. Every year you work, you work towards a goal. To be able to take care of your family, provide a house for them, or take care of your parents. You work towards a goal. It’s not a failure. It’s Steps to Success. There’s good days, bad days. Some days you are able to be successful. Some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn.’”

– Giannis Antetokounmpo, in Giannis The Marvelous Journey

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“I CAME TO CHICAGO WITH NO EXPECTATIONS. NONE. THE ONLY PRESSURE I FELT WHEN I WENT TO THE NBA WAS TO PROVE I DESERVED TO PLAY ON THAT LEVEL. And that was easy because it was a step-by-step process: playing hard every day in practice, playing against veteran teammates, making the starting five, then playing against NBA players in games. No one knew what I was capable of scoring, and no one tried to define me by putting a number to those expectations. No one had in mind what would be acceptable for me. After the first year, the expectations came, but by that time I had positive habits. I had built a foundation for my game, so it wasn’t a surprise to me. I UNDERSTOOD THAT THE REASON I WAS GETTING ATTENTION WAS BECAUSE OF THE WORK I HAD PUT IN UP TO THAT POINT, NOT BECAUSE OF WHAT I HAD DONE TO MEET OTHER PEOPLE’S EXPECTATION FOR ME.”

– Michael Jordan, Driven From Within

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Failure can be reframed as a lesson, and lessons should have no end.

If you stop turning up for lessons, the learning stops. Our growth, which represents life, slows and we are in danger of stagnation, then rot.

It’s in the expansion and retraction, where we strike forth with new ideas and ventures, that we really live.

Inevitably, by trying, we fail. We are forced to withdraw when something doesn’t work.

A new route must be found.

We retrace our steps often.

The steps to success are not an inevitable journey. We are not on a conveyor belt that automatically delivers us to our goal.

We must take those steps to success ourselves. And because we are not machines we will trip and stumble. Why blame ourselves for our imperfection?

Perhaps failure, true failure, is not meeting our own expectations, allowing ourselves to come up short on what we know we could do.

People like Michael and Giannis are remarkable because of their ability to focus and to be relentless in their pursuit of a goal.

Sport is a way for us to witness humans striving in a controlled environment. We can observe athletes like scientists looking for a cure for complacency.

We are free to choose the game in which we experiment.

The arena where I choose to pursue my humble goal of excellence is on this blog.

Writing is a form of play in which I am happy to put in the hours of practice.

And so failure for me, which would result with my head in my hands, would be if I said it was ok to stop practicing and sit on the sidelines, by not writing.

I don’t know what success looks like in any larger sense other than my ability to schedule a post and go to bed content.

Whatever else has happened in my day, I’ve taken that small step in the right direction. Even though I can’t see what the destination is.

I’ll sort out the details along the way.

“To this day, my citadel protecting me from the immobilizing fear of conceptual nothingness is a journal, or a logbook, even a motley sheaf of notes of crudely organized notions, often just loose phrases, ramblings, trial paragraphs, jotted inklings, the best of which have only a lone value—a potential to hatch.”

– William Least Heat-Moon, Writing Blue Highways

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“About this journal: My basic intention is to write down, at the end of each day, what happened — what I did, thought, felt, and so forth — so I can read it, years from now, and remember what it was like. I think it’s best if I don’t concern myself overly with style. I’ll only get frustrated and quit. The second pitfall to avoid is using this journal as a kind of valve to let off steam — for example, writing 20 pages one night about how depressed I am. I’ve kept that kind of journal before. Rereading it, I invariably get disgusted and throw the notebook away. If I’m depressed, I’ll just say so and leave it at that. Basically, I want to write what I’ll want to read later. I’ll probably get better at that with practice. In short, I’m not very concerned with quantity or quality; I just want a reasonable entry for every day of my life, starting now.”

– Jordan Mechner, The Making of Karateka

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Writing every day is a protection against passivity.

The world daily demands energy, sucking our attention and resolution.

My journal is a levee against the threat of other people’s thoughts and ideas.

If I have this space to write I can better determine who I should or shouldn’t listen to.

Because the most important voice is myself. If I don’t know what I think and feel, what chance do I have against the flood tide of stranger’s voices.

I create a paper armour. Only powerful if it has been blackened by my pen. The page, a simple, benign substance, rendered impenetrable only if my words express what I think and feel right now.

“If you walk about your organization talking to people, I’d suggest that you be as curious as possible. As with a good dinner table conversationalist, one question should naturally lead to another. The time to be questioning or even critical is after trust has been established.”

– L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around!

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“My most essential possession is a standard sized school notebook, which can be bought at any stationery shop on any high street. I carry this everywhere. And I write down all the comments that are made to me by Virgin staff and anyone else that I meet. I make notes of all telephone conversations and meetings and I draft out letters and list of telephone calls to make. Over the years I’ve worked my way through a bookcase of them. And the discipline of writing everything down ensures that I have to listen to people carefully.”

– Richard Branson, on The High Performance Podcast, Episode 258

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Taking notes is recording curiosity.

The answers to our questions are valuable, whether directed to ourselves or others.

But it is also very hard to actually listen. What if we valued the views of everyone we meet?

Valued enough to collect them in a notebook?

By writing we give words power. They exist for us to revisit when we need to. Like worshippers to a deity. I look to what has been written for answers to the big questions in life.

Rather than nodding along waiting for the other person to finish talking so I can launch into my own point of view, what if I said ‘that’s interesting, I really need to write that down.’

Everyone we communicate with can be a teacher if we allow them.

Writing is permanent listening. We have a record of answers to questions.

Sometimes we didn’t realise we were asking a question, but got just the answer we needed.

“I’m more about organized behavior routines. Yes, I do put my toothpaste on the same spot all the time. I’m not O.C.D., but I love routine. I get less depressed with routine. You’re just a trained animal in a circus. I like that feeling: Now we’re going to do this trick, now we’re going to do that trick. That makes me feel better. I don’t want too much mental freedom. I have too much of that anyway.”

– Jerry Seinfeld, New York Times

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“When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas.”

– –T. S. ELIOT, quoted in, The Houdini Solution by Ernie Schenck

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Focus is a form of harnessing energy.

A routine is a way of creating a pen in which to hold the unthinking sheep of our day to day routines.

Once we’ve shown up, as usual, to complete the task there is an extra bit of energy derived from the pride of having done it again.

By reducing indecision, friction is reduced.

We put ourselves under strain by placing a box around our creative selves.

It’s in the flexing against the constraints that we get stronger.

Judgement of the rightness of the activity is removed if it is part of a larger system of routine.

It’s like dressing our minds in the same clothes every day. A self imposed uniformity is it’s own style. There is nothing dramatic or wild. But there is consistency.

Routine is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same result. The work is done. The routine does not assess quality. It only guarantees delivery.

Once I’ve been delivered, I do not think of the million other things I could be doing. I am free to do the one thing that needs to get done.

It’s a routine superpower. But it’s powerful.

And free.

“I was in shock, unable to muster the kinds of inner resources that real artists use to fortify themselves when faced with such a challenge. When I teach today, I often judge young artists’ chances of survival based on whether they seem to have the character necessary to solve the inevitable problems in their work. I didn’t. I also didn’t understand how to respond to an outer world that was out of step with my inner life without retreating into total despair. Oscar Wilde said, “Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all.” Artists have to be self-critical enough not to just attack everything they do. I had self-doubt but no real self-critical facility; instead I indiscriminately loved or hated everything I did.”

– Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life

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“The aim is to remove horrors. This really takes a specific level of attention. Pigs love mud and there is a real streak of muddiness in our psyches. It can be soothing to wallow. We prefer to be stunned rather than overwhelmed. Unfortunately the variations of self-pity are the most injurious emotions we have.

Oddly enough our main weapons in controlling drinking are humor and lightness. The judgment of others and self-judgment (stern) are both contraindicatory. When we fuck up we mentally beat ourselves up. It doesn’t work at all and has to be expunged. The reason to slow down is to feel better and it works real good.”

– Jim Harrison, Off to the Side

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Life is not binary. Not a one or zero. Love or hate. Do or do not. Good or bad.

Life is nuance. There are gaps everywhere for us to inhabit and create little worlds.

I write in a tiny crack of the internet. I’m invisible from just about any perspective but right here.

I try to avoid comparisons with what others are doing. I appreciate the simplicity of the setup here.

I am not building empires. This is not writing as conquest.

It helps to have regular reminders that as much as I feel like I zoom around like a hare, my work here is the method of the consistent tortoise.

I am not in a rush. Some days my work brings me joy and satisfaction, others I know when I have compromised to hit my self imposed deadline.

But I show up. Little by little. I don’t write to excess, nor do I binge to console my shame of absence.

Here every day. Like a glass of table wine with dinner. A reliable habit rather than a weekend blowout.

“Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence”

– Simon & Garfunkel, The Sound of Silence

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“The smile on your face lets me know that you need me
There’s a truth in your eyes saying you’ll never leave me
The touch of your hand says you’ll catch me wherever I fall

You say it best, when you say nothing at all”

– Ronan Keating, When You Say Nothing At All

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Sometimes there needs to be a pause.

An intake of breath, an appreciation of not having anything to say.

“We must each be responsible for changing our habits. This takes great discipline, and indeed discipline can be defined as the correct relationship to time.”

– Phil Stutz, Lessons for Living

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“Time is a headfuck. You can only live in the present. But your head could be ruminating on the past, hoping for the future or wishing the day away. You can have too much time or not enough. You can waste your time or it can slip away.

The medium is the metaphor. Watches and clocks make us think time is a certain way. Since the invention of clocks, our perception has changed. Time is no longer eternal; time is measurable. We used to think of time as seasons and days, and now we think in minutes and hours.

The smartest thing you can do with money is to buy time. There’s enough money to go around, there’s plenty of money but time – time is running out. At some point your perspective will change. Time will become more important than money.

Would you give up all your worldly possessions to be half your age? I think so, yes. I’d fucking love to be twenty-five again. If you think, no thanks, I’d rather keep my stuff and stay closer to the grave, then I don’t think you’re really gettin’ this time thing.

Time is the most precious resource we have. If you don’t believe me yet, go to a hospice and ask around.”

– Jimmy Carr, Before and Laughter

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Time is a ruthless arrow.

You can never go back, but you can fast forward by simple inattention: the days rush past when you are distracted by busy work.

This is entropy by inattention. Things tend to disorder and destruction if we lose sight of what brings us joy.

Daily engagement with the practices that deliver nourishment to the soul help us manipulate our days, as if in bullet-time.

I can dodge the traps and attacks of the mundane by focusing on the fun.

What I value spending my time on will never be identical to another’s. This is another example of the benefits of middle age. The movement away from collective opinion into the boondocks of my very own taste.

By paying attention we slow the ageing process.

After all, ageing isn’t simply a mechanical process, it’s attitudinal too.

“My friend Jack Carr wrote his first bestselling thriller in Starbucks and Peet’s and in alcoves at the public library. But he’s the exception. What made it work for him was his intention was so strong, and his passion and his commitment, that he brought a permanent space with him like his own personal hot spot.”

– Steven Pressfield, The Daily Pressfield

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“When I first started writing Norwegian Wood, I wrote at cafés in various places in Greece, on board ferry boats, in the waiting lobbies of airports, in shady spots in parks, and at desks in cheap hotels. Hauling around oversized, four-hundred-character-per-page Japanese manuscript paper was too much, so in Rome I bought a cheap notebook (the kind we used to call college-ruled notebooks) and wrote the novel down in tiny writing with a disposable Bic pen.

I still had to contend with noisy cafés, wobbly tables that made writing difficult, coffee spilling on the pages, and at night in my hotel room when I’d go over what I’d written, sometimes there would be couples getting all hot and heavy beyond the paper-thin walls separating my room from the room next door…

Wherever a person is when he writes a novel, it’s a closed room, a portable study. That’s what I’m trying to say.”

– Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation

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At school, we are forced to write in a formal setting, at a desk, in silence, wearing a uniform.

And we are expected to learn, understand and transform ideas into our own points of view.

But when we’ve moved beyond the formal educational setting, we have the freedom to change our environment.

We can we can write in a busy cafe, we could write in the dead of night. We can write wearing a t-shirt and shorts or a three piece suit if we like.

It’s inspiring to not think of writing as a formal activity: that we must proceed to sit down to create in only one place. Every environment becomes an environment for us to write in.

All the world’s a desk.

No special equipment is required. Words adapt.

“He (David Letterman) said just make sure you fail doing exactly what you want to do.

He told me that and that’s the best advice you can give someone going into this big scary project.

Make sure you fail doing it exactly the way you want it, that you can live with.

When it’s someone else’s idea that kills you, that’s hard to live with.”

– Jerry Seinfeld, Blocks w/ Neal Brennan podcast

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“So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect. So we never dare to ask the universe for it. I’m saying I’m the proof that you can ask the universe for it. Please. And if it doesn’t happen for you right away, it’s only because the universe is so busy fulfilling my order. Party size.

My father could have been a great comedian, but he didn’t believe that that was possible for him. And so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant. And when I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job and our family had to do whatever we could to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don’t want so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”

– Jim Carrey, Commencement Speech 2014, Maharishi University of Management,

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This blog is a failure.

No one reads it.

It generates no income.

I am not a professional writer.

No one has asked me to write any of it.

There is zero demand for my work.

Yet, this is the most satisfying and fulfilling project of my life.

I love writing these posts every day.

I love that this blog gives my reading a purpose.

Every book I buy, I can justify as an investment in my writing career.

Can you have a career if no one is aware that it exists?

But if I keep doing what I love, then I daily prove I am not afraid of my ambitions for myself.

I have a body of work.

What would crush me is if I gave up writing. If I tried to justify the return on investment. If I persuaded myself my time was better spent doing something else.

However, in writing these words I reveal my fear. I am afraid to put my writing in front of other people. I am afraid to ask for the attention of others. I am afraid of potential criticism.

I would love to have a career as a writer. I would love to earn some money as a creative professional.

There, I have said it. In my public forum, where no one got the invite.

Because I write these posts for me, publishing my fears makes them real. They are a tangible target for me to face. They are no longer phantoms, but flesh and blood.

The monster you are shown is never as scary as the one you imagine is lurking around the corner.

What do I do now?

I’m not sure, but I’ll be sure to put it in writing.

“Many ideas come to mind when I’m away from my desk.  I can be doing anything—loading the laundry, eating dinner, talking on the phone, gardening, reading the newspaper, watching TV, walking or driving—when all of a sudden an idea will pop into my head. Here’s the thing:  I always make sure to write down the idea or remind myself on my smartphone right away.  If I don’t do it right away, I’ll not only forget the idea, I’ll regret it. For a writer, a pen and paper or smartphone are a must to have at all times, even on your nightstand, because you never know when an idea will come a-knockin’.”

– Joseph Sutton, This Writing Life

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“Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.” This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song “really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.” “Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes “is trying to trap birds.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground.” Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table.” Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.” Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you “like dreams taken through a straw.’ In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful.

– Tom Waits, interviewed by Elizabeth Gilbert, “Play it Like Your Hair’s on Fire,” GQ 2002 (as quoted by Austin Kleon https://austinkleon.com/tag/jerry-seinfeld/)

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Ideas come knocking at anytime.

Can we hear them?

Is there a doorbell?

Ideas don’t need a sacred space in which to bloom.

They are like the 12 hour delivery window.

You are forced to stay at home all day simply for the pleasure of taking delivery of a piece of furniture.

For that day, the new sofa has power over you.

You can choose to spend the day distracted and frustrated, peeking out of the curtain, tutting.

Or you could get on with some housework, do some tidying, get cooking. When you have forgotten all about the delivery, there is a knock on the door.

Ideas are like that. They have power over you if you try to force them into existence.

If I sit down and try to will myself to come up with a compelling subject for a blog post, then I will quickly feel I will never write an original line again.

But if I put the dinner on, drive to work, shower, anything else but sit and think and stare, then those pesky ideas come out to play.

And I am ready.

Once they are captured and recorded, then I have the power.

I can peak into my collection jar and pick out the ideas that resonate.

I am always collecting. but never expectant.