The goal is not to acquire, but to become. At your funeral people will remember what kind of person you were, not what kind of stuff you had. Your everyday life will need money, and no matter what you do, a fair measure of it will flow through your days. But beyond some minimal amount (way less than a billion) money is not important to who you become. Other assets like your character, your ethics, your work, your relationships, your word, your spirit, your drive – these are your real treasures. Use them to achieve your dreams.
If lightning doesn’t strike, our work need not be delayed. Some storm chasers believe that inspiration precedes creation. This is not always the case. Working without lightning bolts is simply working. Like carpenters, we show up each day and do our job. Sculptors knead clay, sweep the studio floor, and lock up for the night. Graphic designers sit at their workstations, select images, choose fonts, create layouts, and hit save.
Artists are ultimately craftspeople. Sometimes our ideas come through bolts of lightning. Other times only through effort, experiment, and craft. AS we work, we may notice connections and become surprised by the wonder of what’s revealed through the doing itself. In a way, these small a-ha! moments are also bolts of lightning . Less vivid, they still illuminate our way.
– Rick Rubin
The opening chapters of this book had me push it to the side. But for some reason, (short chapters) I read on. The second half of the book Rick dispenses that real talk.
Inspiration is optional. Work is not.
Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being (New York: Penguin Press, 2023).pg 290
“one must work and be bold if one really wants to live.”
– Vincent van Gogh
Vincent’s life motto. Inspired from the book Joy of Life (La joie de vivre) by Émile Zola. He shared this motto with his brother Theo. So much of Vincent’s and Theo’s correspondence was encouragement for each other.
Heiligman, D. (2017). Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers. Henry Holt and Company (BYR). pg 225
Dan’s mother being one of the rare mother’s who follows through on the military school threat:
COWEN: What did you learn from your time as a Royal Canadian Army cadet?
WANG: I think the trite answer is just a lot of discipline. I think that I was a bad kid growing up. I was absolutely not a good child, and I’ll be the first to admit that.
COWEN: What does that mean concretely?
WANG: Ottawa is not only the federal capital of Canada, but it is also the drug capital of Canada. It is very easy to fall into a mischievous crowd when you’re over there. I was playing hooky from school a little bit too much, and running off, and trying to do whatever I found fun and not going to school. I never had good grades growing up. To this day, I will admit that I was academically challenged.
I always just enjoyed taking a book to read in the park or something, rather than sitting in class. My main issue was that I played hooky a little bit too much, raised the ire of my parents. My parents threatened to give me to the army, and I laughed that off, because no parents ever do that. Then, my mom did it. She gave me to the Royal Canadian Army cadets, and they straightened me out.
Taking the opportunity seriously and reconceptualizing tough tasks:
I was a very good army cadet. I was awarded recruit of the year. I was the fastest person in my regiment to be promoted to corporal. I was in the marching band, and I did excellent drill as well. Something I take away from some of the commanding officers whom I grew close to, they would tell me that the ethic of the army was that whatever you imagine is the most difficult thing, you should simply reconceptualize it as the easiest thing, and then you just do it. It turned out to have been a fairly robust lesson.
and writing exercises for the curious and ambitious:
COWEN: How did you learn how to write so well?
WANG: I have always grown up loving to read. My grandfather bought so many books for me, first picture books that had text underneath. Then, my mother also encouraged a reading habit. We had so many books growing up. I think that if I were thinking about writing, first and foremost, I pay attention to cadences. I think about beat. I think about the musicality of the effect.
I think that it is really, really valuable to just have a sense of how the words sound before it falls out of your pen. I have a sense of practice. When I was a musician, every so often I would take some time when I was still a college student to just go to the music library, check out some scores. I did this with a Mahler symphony as well as some Mozart symphonies, to just simply copy out the scores, and just write it all out.
I did this exercise also when I was early in my writing. I would just take a New Yorker article that I really liked, and simply rewrite the entire thing. When you engage in that sort of exercise, you really have a sense of what the composer was thinking when he was plotting out the harmonies. When you do that with a really good piece of writing, whether that’s a New Yorker article, or a really good book, you start having a sense of the choices that the author was making in terms of syntax, in terms of sentence length, in terms of the word choices, and being in a position to make those sorts of choices, I think, is very valuable.
Finding your destiny is step after step after step. Plenty of what you don’t want to do mixed with more of what you don’t want to do. Choose to love your task. A difficult but rewarding approach.
When the video game artist Peter Chan was young, he loved to draw, but he would crumple up his “bad” drawings in fists of frustration. His father convinced him that if he laid the “bad” drawings flat instead of crumpling them up, he could fit more of them in the wastebasket. After his father died, Chan found a folder labeled “Peter” in his father’s possessions. When he looked inside, it was full of his old, discarded drawings. His father had snuck into his room and plucked the drawings he thought were worth saving from the wastebasket.
Encouragement takes many forms. Sometimes it’s fishing out beauty from a wastebasket.
“for the vast majority of its history, Stripe has, I think, attracted people who are drawn to unglamorous infrastructure challenges and problems. We are not a company that specializes in making beautiful cars. We make roads“
Patrick Collison
Always encouraged to do better after hearing Patrick speak. Dwarkesh’s podcast remains underrated.
Floodlights and Goalposts 