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Anne Lamott Quote on Writing Really Poorly Before You Ever Write Anything Good

    “People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts… For me and most other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. If fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.”

    Anne Lamott

    Beyond the Quote (43/365)

    For all of you who are intimidated by the dreaded blank page and have insecurities and self-doubts about writing (or creating in general), let me reassure you: we ALL start out with really, really shitty first drafts.  Not even the best writers in the world (the ones who you envision typing out those perfect, fully formed passages as fast as a court reporters can type) write their final copy on their first try.  It just doesn’t happen.  So, drop the expectation that you’ll be able to do that yourself (sorry not sorry)!

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    Steve Jobs Quote on Simplicity and How Simple Can Be Harder Than Complex

      “That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

      Steve Jobs

      Beyond the Quote (42/365) Part 2: On Simplicity

      Read First: Steve Jobs Quote on Focus and Working Hard To Keep Thinking Clean (Part 1)

      Once we become aware of the fact that we’re in the midst of a full-blown battle for attention and that we’re literally being wired to enjoy distractions, we can start taking the proper steps to regain control.  If we don’t even know we’re in a battle or that we’re being rewired, after all, how can we know to do anything about it?  If we want to produce the best work of our lives then blocking out distractions and focusing our attention on the deep and thoughtful type of work is key.

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      Steve Jobs Quote on Focus and Working Hard To Keep Thinking Clean

        “That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

        Steve Jobs

        Beyond the Quote (41/365) Part 1: On Focus

        The ability to focus, or more clearly stated, the ability to block out distractions—especially in today’s world—is absolutely critical in producing the best work of your life.  Think about it.  Distractions are the things that take your attention elsewhere—away from what it should be/ could be doing.  And when your attention is over there, it’s certainly not over here—focused on the deep, thoughtful work that requires long chains of uninterrupted time for thought, flow, play, introspection, and execution.  And the more that your attention ends up over there in distraction, either deliberately or unexpectedly, the work you could be doing over here gets sidetracked and lost.

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          “Resistance can be overcome by doing the smallest possible step.  For meditation, I just had to get my butt on the cushion.  For writing, I just had to open up a document and write a few words.  For cooking healthy food, I just had to get out a knife and an onion.  For studying a language, I just had to press ‘play’ on the audio lesson.  For yoga, I just had to get into child’s pose.  For blogging, I just had to open up the form for writing a new post.  For flossing, I just had to floss one tooth.  For reading, I just had to open up the book and read a sentence. I think you get the point.  Find the minimum viable habit.  The smallest increment of doing the activity.  The least objectionable version.  And the resistance is overcome.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 80)

            “Never let your mood determine whether you should do something or not.  Mood is a bad indicator of the worthiness of any activity.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 80)

            Leo Babauta Quote on Using Mistakes As Feedback

              “Use mistakes as feedback.  They’re not signs that you’re a bad person or have no discipline.  They’re signs that you need to adjust.”

              Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 71)

              Beyond the Quote (39/365)

              In his book, Essential Zen Habits, Leo Babauta shares a simple story about mistakes that might help you shift your paradigm from looking at mistakes as catastrophic failures to seeing them as opportunities for indispensable feedback.  Imagine you are walking across a pond using a small stone path.  It’s not the most stable path and it zig zags across the water, but can none-the-less get you to the other side.  If you wanted to get to the other side safely and dry, you would have to carefully place each step and make the proper balance adjustments along the way (I believe in you).

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                “You don’t control the results of growing a plant—it will grow however it grows, because we don’t have god-like powers that can control how a plant will grow.  You don’t control the outcome, but you do control the inputs.  You can water it, give it more sunlight, feed it some nutrients, give it good soil, make sure bugs aren’t eating it.  You control the inputs and environment, but not the outcome.  So Grow a Plant when you’re making changes: you don’t control the outcome, so you can’t get fixated on it.  Don’t attach too tightly to the results of a change.  Instead, focus on creating a good environment.  Focus mostly on the inputs: what are you bringing to the change?  What is your intention?  What is your effort?  What is your enjoyment and mindfulness?  If you do this with weight loss, then you don’t focus on the weight loss itself.  You focus on the input: what kind of food are you eating? Are you eating mindfully?  Do you have a compassionate intention when it comes to your eating?  Are you exercising mindfully?  Are you giving yourself a good environment to support these changes?  If you focus on the inputs, you don’t know what the plant of your weight loss change will result in.  Maybe it will mean a slimmer version of you, maybe a healthier one, maybe a stronger one with more muscle.  You don’t know exactly, because you can’t sculpt your body like clay.  What you can do is water it, give it sunlight and good nutrients, and see how it grows.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 57)

                  “Success is never due to one thing, but failure can be.  Sleeping well won’t make you successful, but not sleeping enough will hold you back. Hard work is rarely enough without good strategy, but even the best strategy is useless without hard work.  Many things are necessary, but not sufficient for success.” ~ James Clear, Blog

                  Eckhart Tolle Quote on Monitoring Your Mental-Emotional State To Keep Your Inside Right

                    “Make it a habit to monitor your mental-emotional state through self-observation.  ‘Am I at ease at this moment?’ is a good question to ask yourself frequently.  Or you can ask: ‘What’s going on inside me at this moment?’  Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside.  If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.”

                    Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 77)

                    Beyond the Quote (38/365)

                    For so many of us, the gap between an outside stimulus and our response is immediate and reflexive.  We react with the immediate feelings and emotions that arise without really knowing what those feelings and emotions even are—until after the fact.  Acting and then thinking has it’s time and it’s place, but so does thinking and then acting.  Get it wrong and things could get far more complicated and challenging than they need to.

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                    Leo Babauta Quote on How Self-Reflection Changed His Life

                      “Self-reflection has turned out to be one of my most powerful tools in changing my life.  It becomes a mirror that helps you see what’s going on in your life, that keeps you from making the same mistakes over and over again, from being on autopilot and failing to course-correct.  Having a blog with readers is like having a journal on steroids—it forces you to reflect on what you’re doing in your life, because if you’re going to share what you’re learning with other people, you first have to reflect on what you’ve learned.”

                      Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 50)

                      Beyond the Quote (37/365)

                      Creating space for self-reflective thinking is crucial for self-improvement.  If you want to live your best life, you have to take time on a regular basis to take a good look at where you are, where you are going, what has happened, what those “happenings” mean, and what needs to be adjusted so that you can keep moving forward.

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                        “What’s the typical feedback loop for someone who doesn’t exercise much? When she does the exercise, she gets discomfort, sweatiness, tiredness, maybe even soreness.  That’s negative feedback for doing the exercise.  Not doing the exercise is much more comfortable, because she’s on the Internet doing easy, mildly pleasurable tasks.  That’s positive feedback for not doing the exercise.  The combination of these two feedback loops is why—at first—it’s so hard to form the exercise habit.  People are up against much more than they realize, because no amount of willpower can overcome a setup of feedback loops that go against the behavior they’re trying to create.  And it works like that for every single habit: eating junk food and shopping and playing games are easy habits to create and hard to break, while exercise and mediation and eating vegetables and learning languages are much harder.  All because of the feedback loops.  So what are we to do?  Reverse the feedback loops to get the behavior we want.  We want positive feedback for the habit we’re creating: rewards, praise, physical pleasure, spending time with a friend, getting stars on a chart, continuing a streak, a feeling of accomplishment, enjoying the activity with a smile.  We want negative feedback for not doing the habit: embarrassment of people knowing you didn’t do it, losing a bet, enduring some embarrassing consequence, losing the streak you’ve created, experiencing some kind of difficulty or loss.  Grease the slope.  Create public accountability.  Set up rewards and consequences.  The smarter you’ve set up your feedback loops, the better you’ll be at doing the habit.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 42)

                          “Imagine yourself as a kid who wakes up after a night of heavy snowfall.  There’s a thick layer of snow on the ground, clean and without a path.  The first time you walk through this snow, you have a very wide array of choices for what path to take.  You can walk to the left, down the middle, to the right, zig zag, walk over that hill, and so on.  Not only do you have many choices of paths to take, but each one will be very difficult, because there’s a foot of snow everywhere.  Now picture walking to school the next day …the snow from the previous day is still there, but now there’s a bit of a path you created from yesterday’s walk.  You can still create a new path, but the one you created yesterday will be a bit easier.  So you take that one.  Each day, you decide to take the path already created.  This is a groove in the snow that gets easier over time, until you’re probably not going to take any other path.  Creating a new habit is a lot like that: you’re creating a groove in the snow.  At first, you can go anywhere, and it’s difficult going …but once you’ve created a groove, it’s much easier, and you don’t have to forget new paths anymore.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 28)

                          Seth Godin Quote on Making The Decision To Excel

                            “The universal truth is beyond question – the only people who excel are those who have decided to do so.” ~ Seth Godin

                            Beyond the Quote (36/365)

                            Excelling is optional.  And so is the opposite.  The path of least resistance is the path most people decide to follow.  Why wouldn’t that be the case?  Naturally, we are lazy creatures.  We’re wired to conserve energy—both by expending less (moving less) and storing more (fat on your body)—so that we don’t starve to death if we can’t get more food.  These were critical adaptations that were made over the course of our existence as humans that kept us alive during harsh periods of existence.

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                            Viktor Frankl Quote on Success and Looking At It As A Side-Effect Rather Than A Target

                              “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

                              Viktor Frankl

                              Beyond the Quote (35/365)

                              Having an aim in life is important.  Aim gives direction and direction gives energy, effort, and resources a focused purpose.  Without an aim you would presumably wander around aimlessly which, of course, would waste time, energy, effort, and resources.  It’s like if I gave you a bow-and-arrow and told you to shoot the target.  The first question you would necessarily ask is, “Where is the target?” 

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                                “Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.” ~ Haruki Murakami

                                  “You are only as mentally tough as your life demands you to be.  An easy life fashions a mind that can only handle ease. A challenging life builds a mind that can handle challenge. Like a muscle that atrophies without use, mental strength fades unless it is tested.  When life doesn’t challenge you, challenge yourself.​” ~ James Clear, Blog