John Steinbeck on Falling in Love: A 1958 Letter
brainpickings.orgThe main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
Estimated reading time: 3 min
The Nature of Fun: David Foster Wallace on Why Writers Write
brainpickings.orgUnder fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers everywhere share and respond to, feel.
Estimated reading time: 5 min
The Science of Love: How Positivity Resonance Shapes the Way We Connect
brainpickings.orgYou refer to ‘my anxiety,’ ‘his anger,’ or ‘her interest.’ Following this logic, love would seem to belong to the person who feels it. Defining love as positivity resonance challenges this view. Love unfolds and reverberates between and among people — within interpersonal transactions — and thereby belong to all parties involved
Estimated reading time: 7 min
How to Avoid Work: A 1949 Guide to Doing What You Love
brainpickings.orgTo my mind, the world would be a much pleasanter and more civilized place to live in, if everyone resolved to pursue whatever is closest to his heart’s desire. We would be more creative and our productivity would be vastly increased.
Estimated reading time: 11 min
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brainpickings.orgteaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Brain Pickings
brainpickings.orgThe greatest love letters, of course, aren’t those written for public greatness — they’re the ones penned for one particular trembling heart, honeycombed with private memories and private miracles, written in the language of the possible.
Estimated reading time: 5 min
10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy
brainpickings.org2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
Estimated reading time: 2 min
The Importance of Frustration in the Creative Process, Animated
brainpickings.orgWhen we tell stories about creativity, we tend to leave out this phase. We neglect to mention those days when we wanted to quit, when we believed that our problem was impossible. Instead, we skip straight to the breakthrough. We tell the happy ending first. The danger of this scenario is that the act of feeling frustrated is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer — before we can even know the question — we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost. Because it’s[…]
Estimated reading time: 2 min
14 Ways to Acquire Knowledge: A Timeless Guide from 1936
brainpickings.orgThe men of the best memories are those who make notes, who write things down. They just don’t write to remember, they write to learn. And because they DO learn by writing, they seldom need to consult their notes, they have brilliant, amazing memories. How different from the glib, slipshod individual who is too proud or too lazy to write, who trusts everything to memory, forgets so easily, and possesses so little real knowledge.
Estimated reading time: 9 min
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