Jason Fried and Heinemeier Hansson (co-creaters of Basecamp) in their book Rework:

Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.

(The illustration is from their book, too, and my real reason for this post: Just to share that bit of simple but brilliant communication.)

Fr. Michel:

Itzak Perlman, the world famous violinist, has performed magnificently throughout his decades long career. If you’ve ever seen him in concert, you know that he walks with crutches and two braces on his legs, due to the fact that he had polio as a child. When he walks on stage one step at a time, slowly, painfully, it is an unforgettable sight. He makes his way to his chair, sits down, puts his crutches on the floor, and undoes the clasps on the leg braces. Then he bends down and picks up his violin, places it under his chin and nods to the conductor that he is ready to begin.

One night, however, something went wrong. Just as he finished playing the first few measures, one of the strings on his violin broke. You know the sound when you hear it, it’s like a pistol shot. There is no mistaking what it means, so everyone knew he would have to get up, put the braces back on, pick up his crutches and slowly make his way off stage to replace the string. But this time he didn’t. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes, and signaled the conductor to begin again.

The orchestra began and he played again with such passion and power, that both the other musicians and the audience were stunned. You see, everyone knows that it is impossible to play violin with only three strings. Mr. Perlman refused to accept that, and so he modulated, transposed, recomposed the piece in his head as he played. Those who were there said it sounded like he had somehow completely retuned the remaining strings to the point where the piece never sounded better. And when he finished, there was a stunned silence in the opera hall. Then people were on their feet, cheering and screaming in appreciation. Mr. Perlman stood and motioned for the audience to quiet down, and then he said in a humble voice, “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”

And so, as we ourselves struggle to make sense of our lives, as we wrestle with our addictions, as we try to manage our time and support the people of the parish and make good choices, perhaps it is instructive for us to remember his words. Right now, while we are in the prime of our lives, we are able to make music for God with all the gifts at our disposal. But someday, when some of those gifts are no longer ours, we will continue to make music with whatever we have left. And it will be magnificent.

photo credit: redlynxx01 via photopin cc

must. sharpen. pencils.

Gretchen Rubin, in a short article titled “Working: One of the Most Dangerous Forms of Procrastination“:

When I have to do something I don’t want to do, any other task seems irresistibly enticing.”

Or as Robert Benchley put it:

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

And John Perry, author of The Art of Procrastination, says:

[To be a procrastinator,] one needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also.

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photo credit: jurek d. via photopin cc

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Jason Fried, co-founder of 37 Signals:

There are two things in this world that take no skill:

1. Spending other people’s money and

2. Dismissing an idea.

Read the rest of the excellent post, about giving ideas a chance: Give it five minutes.

Tyler Tate:

If you’re not crashing, you’re not trying.

(See also: Learning is a gift…)

photo credit: f_mafra via photopin cc

Lysa TerKeurst:

Most overnight success stories are years in the making. Value the daily discipline of small steps, hard work, honing your craft, and putting in time learning and developing. Take classes. Be mentored. Push through those moments you want to slack off. And do it over and over — year after year.

The French aviator, aircraft designer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, probably best known for his classic children’s book The Little Prince:

…Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away….

The quote in context, from his book Wind, Sand and Stars:

Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man’s industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?

It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of  a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

Epictetus (A.D.200):

No great thing is created suddenly.

Jeff Goins, in an interview with Joshua Becker:

You don’t have to do something every day for the rest of your life in order to be good at it. You really only have to do it for a concentrated amount of time. It’s like working out: if you do it several times a week for 30–60 minutes, you’re going to get good. Writing is the same way. It only took me eight months of writing like a maniac to get a book deal. Most people don’t realize that the thing they dream of doing is closer than they think. It’s just a matter of dedicated practice.

Art is hard…. No one puts himself out there quite like an artist. Imagine taking a piece of yourself and putting it on display for others to see and comment on, day after day. Artists find strength in vulnerability.

Vincent van Gogh, At Eternity’s Gate, 1890 (the year of his death)

In Zen in the Art of Writing, you wrote that early on in your career you made lists of nouns as a way to generate story ideas: the Jar, the Cistern, the Lake, the Skeleton. Do you still do this?

RAY BRADBURY:

Not as much, because I just automatically generate ideas now. But in the old days I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this. I learned this early on. Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now…. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? …You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, “Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them.” When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.

Please do not reproduce this art without linking to artist.*

For my daughter, who is writing a story, in Greece.   -js.

Richard Wilbur:

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

* Art by Kirsty Griffin; for sale on etsy.

Poem discovered via Bill Coleman; thanks!

This is a quote that burned itself into my mind many years ago. I’ve lost the source or author. (If you know it, let me know, please!) It brings a perspective that’s incredibly helpful to remember when you’re feeling that all is lost:

Feelings of failure are based on the assumption that now is the only time that counts.

I don’t believe in writer’s block. It’s not that sometimes you can’t write, it’s that you can’t write* well. Experience has told me that writing poorly sometimes leads to something better. Not writing at all leads only to reruns of “Law and Order.” Which I love, but still.

(At the end of a day’s writing), I always stop in mid-sentence. Starting a new chapter or a new paragraph first thing in the morning might be too much to bear. But I can always manage to finish a sentence. And one sentence has a way of following another if everything else around me is routine enough.

*Or design. (sic)

Jason Fried, co-creator of Basecamp:

As complexity and confusion grows, simple tools become more and more valuable. …. Not everything has to be a Swiss Army Knife. Sometimes a screwdriver just needs to be a screwdriver.

THE SIX PHASES OF A DESIGN PROJECT
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Praise for the non-participants

I had lunch with a friend and her parents last weekend. Her father is a landscape architect so I couldn’t resist asking him about desire lines. Desire lines are the paths people make when they cut across a grassy area instead of following the prescribed walkway. Rather than discourage people from making their own way, landscape architects can opt to design walkways to accommodate the natural patterns formed after a period of use. It’s a nice illustration of an emergent design technique that’s obviously analogous to such techniques for web sites. However, he mentioned something that I hadn’t heard before — not only will they wait to see where the users prefer to go, but also they’ll take note of the more heavily worn and thus more popular paths. They’ll then design wider pathways for these high traffic areas. So, you might have the situation where the grandest building on, say, a college campus might be the administration’s preference for a large, imposing walkway, but the usage patterns dictate that another building is the more popular. The result is the familiar negotiation between what the stakeholders want to project and what the users need.

Eliel Saarinen quoted by his son Eero, Time, 2 Jun 77:

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. ~Leonardo da Vinci

“We’ve all heard ‘Pick two: good, fast, or cheap.’ Dealing with client projects is no different. Your client needs to pick two: fixed scope, fixed timeframe, or fixed budget. Having all three is a myth. Pick three and you’ll end up with a lot of unsatisified people and subpar results.” Jason Fried, 37signals.com/svn 4/1/05