I liked a quote from Thoreau in Walden, which I highlighted from Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism. “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
With this open time
You do not have to write the next bestselling novel
You do not have to get in the best shape of your life
You do not have to start that podcastWhat you can do instead is observe this pause as an opportunity
The same systems we see crumbling in society
Are being called to crumble in each of us individually
The systems that taught us we are machines
That live to produce & we are disposable if we are not doing so
The systems that taught us monetary gain takes priority over humanity
The systems that create our insecurities then capitalize off of them
What if we became curious with this free time, & had no agenda other than to experience being?
What if you created art for the sake of creating?
What if you allowed yourself to rest & cry & laugh & play & get curious about whatever arises in you?
What if our true purpose is in this space?
As if mother earth is saying: we can no longer carry on this way,
The time is now - I am reminding you who you are.
Will you remember?(Emphasis mine.)
—Emma Zeck
Via Ana García Puyol.
"How does one achieve peace of mind?" On the latter point, Plutarch's advice was the same as Seneca's: focus on what is present in front of you, and pay full attention to it.
—Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer
Every requirement is an opportunity for delight, even the ugly ones. Sometimes the creative treatment of these warts are the most enjoyable parts of a design.
—Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design
Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it. —Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception
We call a brand or a person authentic when they're consistent, when they act the same way whether or not someone is looking. Someone is authentic when their actions are in alignment with what they promise.
Showing up as a pro.
Keeping promises.
Even when you don't feel like it.
Especially when you don't.
—Seth Godin
Read the whole thing on Seth's Blog.
We are all busy. We are definitely doing something wrong.
We have more things to do today than we could do in a whole week. More often than we’d like to, we produce things and forget we have to "sell" them.
It does not matter how good what you create is, the need to market it is always there—people need, somehow, to know about your product. There is no way they can give it a chance if they don’t even know it exists.
Along the same lines, you need to let them know what you are up to. No matter what you are doing, it is extremely important to **give your potential customers a way to keep track of what you are working on—**especially if what you are pursuing is to build a tribe, a community. May it be a mailing list (which you should already be rolling out), an RSS feed, or a social media account, your users must have a way to follow your work, one that they are comfortable using already. The best case scenario is, probably, a combination of all of those mentioned, so the user can choose how she'll be hearing from you.
It’s one of my biggest business mistakes, not setting up an email list for several years. —Ramit Sethi
Giving people a way to know about what you are doing is key to any activity that relies on a tribe. Even more important, is providing users who value your product with ways to pay for it. Remember that store that couldn’t take your money because they didn’t accept payments by card? The worst thing you can do is having users willing to follow and pay for your work and not letting them do it.
This essay is part of the book I am writing on how to organize your life in order to create more and better. If you want to receive new parts of the book as I write them, please join here, and check other posts that will be on the book.
Efficiency facilitates the creative process by enabling more time for exploration as less time is needed for the final production. — Casey Reas & Chandler Williams, FORM+CODE in Design, Art, and Architecture
There’s a myth that time is money. In fact, time is more precious than money. It’s a nonrenewable resource. Once you’ve spent it, and if you’ve spent it badly, it’s gone forever. — Neil A. Fiore
Essentially, time isn't money. You will never recover the time passed. We find it difficult to frame our lives this way. Money spent can be recovered and it will, maybe, free up slots of time in our busy schedules, but it won't—ever—buy us more time.
As a reminder, Frank Chimero sums it up in two short sentences.
Money is circulated. Time is spent. — Frank Chimero
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This essay is part of the book I am writing on how to organize your life in order to create more and better. If you want to receive new parts of the book as I write them, please join here, and check other posts that will be on the book.
While reading Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, I found this quote—penned by William Morris, an influential designer, writer, and socialist of the nineteen century—which summarizes what minimalism is in terms of physical belongings.
Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something. — Jackie Mason
Write up an itinerary — even if you don’t follow it, your grandmother will feel better (mine did). — Mary Hill on Vagabonding
The simple shortcut: the way we respond to the things that we can't change can instantly transform our lives. "That's interesting," is a thousand times more productive than, "that's terrible." Even more powerful is our ability to stop experiencing failure before it even happens, because, of course, it usually doesn't.
Happiness, for most of us, is a choice. Reality is not. It seems, though, that choosing to be happy ends up changing the reality that we keep track of.
The way you see the world—and the way you deal with things—is often more important than what is actually happening out there.
If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do. — Benjamin Franklin
When possible, the brain makes a behavior into a habit, which saves effort and therefore gives us more capacity to deal with complex, novel, or urgent matters. Habits mean we don’t strain ourselves to make decisions, weigh choices, dole out rewards, or prod ourselves to begin. Life becomes simpler, and many daily hassles vanish. — Gretchen Rubin
Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect. — Raymond Joseph Teller
Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird:
Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
Bruce Schneier on lessons learned from the Sony Attack:
Everything is now digital, and storage is cheap—why not save it all?
Sony illustrates the reason why not. The hackers published old e-mails from company executives that caused enormous public embarrassment to the company. They published old e-mails by employees that caused less-newsworthy personal embarrassment to those employees, and these messages are resulting in class-action lawsuits against the company. They published old documents. They published everything they got their hands on.
Saving data, especially e-mail and informal chats, is a liability.
The vast amount of data we generate daily can turn against us anytime in the future.
People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it. — George Bernard Shaw
Make. Share. Try. Get things done. Mute interruptions.
Success is waking up in the morning, whoever you are, wherever you are, however old or young, and bounding out of bed because there's something out there that you love to do, that you believe in, that you're good at; something that's bigger than you are, and you can hardly wait to get at it again today. —Whit Hobbs
People never want to be part of the process, but they want to be part of the outcome. The process is where you figure out who´s worth being part of the outcome.
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If you are thinking on doing something and sharing it with the world, it is worth while to read the following from Seth Godin:
You might be waiting for things to settle down. For the kids to be old enough, for work to calm down, for the economy to recover, for the weather to cooperate, for your bad back to let up just a little...
The thing is, people who make a difference never wait for just the right time. They know that it will never arrive.
Instead, they make their ruckus when they are short of sleep, out of money, hungry, in the middle of a domestic mess and during a blizzard. Whenever.
As long as whenever is now.
Nothing will tell you when is the best moment to do something, or when that thing has reached perfection. Over analyzing flaws will stop you from shipping. Also, the way you value a product is different from how other people who do, as not everyone understand the world as you do.
What are you waiting for?
Get your product out now. Just ship it.
After you make a list, after you've exhaustively chronicled your options, will you choose: easy, cheap, proven, brave, certain, big payoff, fun, convenient, known, unknown, important, urgent, challenging...
There is no perfect answer, but knowing which way your compass points (and saying it out loud) is the best way to move forward.
— Seth Godin
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Everyone gets organized at some point, they just might not be around for it. — Sue DeRoos
This sentence was quoted by Erin Doland in her book Unclutter Your Life In One Week:
DeRoos comment was morbid, but absolutely true. At some point, someone is responsible for sorting, purging, and getting your affairs in order - either you do it while you’re alive, or your loved ones do it after your gone.
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When I was young I observed that nine out of every ten things I did were failures, so I did ten times more work. — George Bernard Shaw
Connected. But Alone. —Sherry Turkle: Alone Together at TED
The Innovation Of Loneliness shows how social networking is making worse and worse our personal relations and not helping to improve social problems already existing in society.
What is art by Ries Straver brings pretty different answers that try to define art.
Art is everything.
For myself, art is everything that we find difficult to do or simple don't have the knowledge to do. In society, things previously considered art by the masses stop being considered art after their production becomes democratized, widely-known and affordable.
