Read Lovely Books
Plus, how one of the greatest writers of our time got so much done
Scratch that, hanging on to anything you care about feels like a bloody street fight
My day job entered its “busy season” right as I moved to a new city
My car decided to break down somewhere in the middle of all that
“I believe in the basics: attention to, and perfection of, tiny details that might be commonly overlooked
In Ryan Holiday’s new book “Discipline is Destiny” he immediately quotes the novelist Toni Morrison
“Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make contact
Where they become the conduit or where they engage in this mysterious process
Throughout her career, she wrote ten novels, five children’s books, and two plays
At the beginning of her career, Toni worked a 9–5 at a publishing house while raising two boys
Not being in the light, but “being before the light arrives
Your friends will wake up at 7:30 am and scroll Instagram till 8 am
For writers, it’s impossible to be any good without reading a lot
Elon Musk learned how to build rockets from an old Soviet-era rocket manual
Lin Manuel Miranda got the idea for Hamilton from reading a biography while on vacation
We praise people who make “gut” decisions; that they possess the “clutch” gene or something
My Routine: I read for about 1-hour each morning before I write
My best friend and chef first introduced me to the term “mise en place
”Or “mise” if you’re tight with the restaurant industry
It’s French slang, but to our ears, it simply means “everything in its place
If a pot is in the wrong location, if an ingredient gets to the chef a few
Just think about all the useless apps clogging up your cell phone right now
Clean your room, organize the folders on your desktop, and put away the dishes
My Routine: It’s simple, I can’t go to bed if dishes are not put away,
The things that don’t require much skill but are equally important