You have to stop thinking about anything other than what happened when you were a little kid, and you laid on the floor, and you drew. And you lost yourself in that drawing. And in the end, you absolutely loved that drawing because you made it yourself. And the drawing got hung up on the fridge regardless of how good it was, because your mom loves you and everybody loves you. Why can’t you be that kind to yourself?
Jeff Tweedy‘s book, How to Write One Song, applies to anyone who makes things. Music is the medium he reflects on, but when you read the book, swap the word “song” with anything you make – paintings, birdhouses, stock cars, stained glass windows.
Robinson lived a tortured life. His parents died while he was still a young man. He battled alcoholism. He was in love with his brother’s (Herman) wife Emma. And worked probably the worst day job of all time – 10 hours a day walking the darkness as a New York Subway time-checker. He once went an 11 year stretch without publishing a poem. And when finally published, the critics ridiculed his poetry. But despite life’s beat-downs, he found the fortitude to keep writing.
Pete Doctor is Pixar’s chief creative officer. Recently he sat down for an interview with economist Steven Levitt. On his People I (Mostly) Admire podcast, Steve asked Pete one of my favorite, but ridiculous interview questions. What live advice would you give the 20 year old Pete Doctor, knowing what you know now?
Pete’s response:
I’d probably tell myself draw more. Just get outside and draw, cause your draftsmanship skills are always handy. But more importantly I think, drawing for me, really connects me to stuff. It forces me to see things. I can walk past a house everyday, but then if I stop and draw it I suddenly notice details and things about it that I’d never payed attention to before. So I feel like drawing is a way to slow me down and really connect me to the world that I’m inhabiting that I’m not always fully paying attention to.
An excellent interview for all you drawers out there. Listen in full here.
Dana Gioia snapped my synapses when he shared this definition of the novel:
Now, the great thing of literature–and this is literature as distinct from film and other theater, which are forms of storytelling–but the beauty of the novel and poetry is that they essentially are our cultural machinery for articulating the inner lives of people. In effect, the novel is based on–the very definition of the novel, although people never talk about this–is based on irony. Which is to say, somebody’s outer life is doing this and their inner life is doing that.
It’s hard to think of a novel that doesn’t follow this idea. I’m sure there’s some experimental four hundred pager out there, but the novels I truly know all exhibit this tension between the characters inner and outer life.
In Tolkien’s The Hobbit – Bilbo duels between his craving for comfortable Shire life and his Took instincts for adventure.
In Jeff Smith’s Bone – Fone Bone longs to return to Boneville, but harbors a secret love for Thorn who could never follow him there (Graphic novels count too right?).
Or in Jhumpa Lahiri’sThe Namesake – Gogol’s divided between the need to honor his parents and his traditional Indian heritage, and the allure of American success.
Irony threads through all of them. And novels will no longer read the same to me.
Russ Roberts and Dana Gioia’s conversation was inspiring throughout.
Before he served as the second President of the United States, John Adams was an ambitious young lawyer. To help master the craft of law, he kept a “literary” commonplace book. In it he copied passages of books he admired.
But after attending several sessions of the local court, he felt himself “irresistibly impelled” to the law. In the meantime, he was reading Milton, Virgil, Voltaire, Viscount Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study and Use of History, and copying long extracts in a literary commonplace book.
But according to Founders Online, Adams didn’t collect quotations in his commonplace book:
Adams did not collect quotations in his Commonplace Book, but what appear to be abstracts of pertinent passages drawn either from his reading in legal works such as Doctor and Student, Instructor Clericalis, and the reports, or from the notebooks of others at the bar.
In the final pages, of the final chapter of On the Move, Sacks returns to one of his favorite topics – writing.
Journaling was essential for Sacks. He always kept a notebook close:
I started keeping journals when I was fourteen and at last count had nearly a thousand. They come in all shapes and sizes, from little pocket ones which I carry around with me to enormous tomes. I always keep a notebook by my bedside, for dreams as well as nighttime thoughts, and I try to have one by the swimming pool or the lakeside or the seashore; swimming too is very productive of thoughts which I must write, especially if they present themselves, as they sometimes do, in the form of whole sentences or paragraphs.
On using journals as method for talking to one’s self:
My journals are not written for others, nor do I usually look at them myself, but they are a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.
Sacks strays away from the tortured writer narrative. His attitude towards writing is similar to Ray Bradbury.
It’s a pleasure. It’s a joy. It’s an elixir to the chaos of life.
The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place – irrespective of my subject-where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day.
And after seventy years writing is still fun!
Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago.
Dr. Sacks describing his meeting with the Noble Prize winning physical chemist Gerald M. Edelman:
He then abruptly took his leave, and looking out the window, I could see him walking rapidly down York Avenue, looking to neither side. “That is the walk of a genius, a monomaniac,” I thought to myself. “He is like a man possessed.” I had a sense of awe and envy-how I should like such a ferocious power of concentration! But then I thought that life might not be entirely easy with such a brain, indeed, Edelman, I was to find, took no holidays, slept little, and was driven, almost bullied, by nonstop thinking; he would often phone Rosenfield in the middle of the night. Perhaps I was better off with my own, more modest endowment.
Dr. Oliver Sacks
While Edelman’s drive and single focus is admirable. Sacks goes further, admitting his envy for Edelman. Sacks recognized that while Edelman’s abilities were desirable, there was a freedom in his less “focused” life.
Sack’s intellectual work, a combination of working with patients, writing books, traveling, love for cephalopods, taking piano lessons in his seventies wasn’t “focused”. But it was rich.
Dr. Sacks opens the chapter – Voyages with a reflection on his father’s work ethic and subtle career advice.
At one time, my father had thought of a career in neurology but then decided that general practice would be “more real,” “more fun,” because it would bring him into deeper contact with people and their lives.
This intense human interest he preserved to the last: when he reached the age of ninety, David and I entreated him to retire-or at least, to stop his house calls. He replied that home visits were “the heart” of medical practice and that he would sooner stop anything else. From the age of ninety to almost ninety-four, he would charter a mini-cap for the day to continue house calls.
Dr. Oliver Sacks
After reading this passage Paul Graham’s essay How to Do What You Love came to mind. In that essay, Graham argues one should build a career (I’d argue a life) based on genuine interests, rather than prestige.
Sack’s father intuitively understood this. A neurologist does hold a higher status in society than a general practice doctor. And certainly more than a general practice doctor making house calls. But it was in that general practice, meeting the needs of his fellow man, that Sack’s father built a meaningful life.
I wonder if Dr. Sacks (sr.) had chosen Neurology, would he have had the same enthusiasm and stamina to continue working into his ninety’s?
I love how Bobbito not only kept his off season workout sheet (written by coaching legend Morgan Wooten) into adulthood, but also published it in his book – Where’d You’d Get Those?
Coach Wooten’s off-season workout regimen is a reminder of the importance of practice. Remove the word “basketball” if needed and replace it with painting, forklifting, clarineting, YouTubing…
Whatever skill or hobby you’re wanting to improve at, creating a specific practice routine will help accelerate your progress.
Basketball is a game in which you either get better or you get worse. It has become so highly competitive that in order to perform to the best of your ability at all times, you must work to improve constantly. The summer is the time when a player can work on individual fundamentals that make him a better player.
Coach Morgan Wooten
1. BALL HANDLING (15 minutes)
A. Pound the ball both hands
B. Finger tip drills
C. Pass ball around your mid section
D. Single leg circle - both legs
E. Around legs and body both ways
F. Figure 8 both ways
G. Figure 8 and drop both ways
H. Crab run both ways
I. Side catch
J. Front catch
K. Spin ball on finger
After 3 months, I’ve returned to Dr. Oliver Sacks’ memoir – On the Move: A Life.
Reading each page is skiing downhill. A smooth, lightning shot of a journey that slaloms through Dr. Sacks’ curious life.
It’s been a joy.
From the chapter, City Island:
Especially in our early days, I sometimes felt terrified of his directness – terrified in particular, that he would find my writings, such as they were, muzzy, dishonest, talentless, or worse. I had feared his criticisms at the beginning, but from 1971 on, when I sent him Migraine, I was eager for his reactions, depended on them, and gave more weight than those of anyone else.
Dr. Oliver Sacks
Even Dr. Sacks feared critique of his writing. Especially from his friend and correspondent the poet Thom Gunn.
But as much as Gunn’s directness terrified Dr. Sacks, he valued Gunn’s feedback of his writing more than anyone else’s.
Sacks understood Gunn’s feedback would improve his writing.
Sacks also describes Gunn in the opening of the City Island chapter as a tremendous walker:
Thom was always a tremendous walker, striding up and down the hills of San Francisco. I never saw him with a car or a bicycle; he was quintessentially a walker, a walker like Dickens, who observed everything, took it in, and used it sooner or later in what he wrote.
Throughout On The Move, Sacks introduces us to new characters as if you’d be joining them for a Friday dinner party.
Sacks’ detailed descriptions of their character quirks reveal their humanity.
