…the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions…It takes a while. It’s going to take you a while. It’s normal to take awhile. And you just have to fight your way through that.
Ira Glass on Storytelling
I’ve spent entirely too long trying to come up with a post that explains what is about to happen and how the above and below quotes fit in. Considering it doesn’t matter, I give up.
Suffice to say that I have a new goal to help me get into the habit of actually being creative: a story a day. So here are some things you should know about these stories —
- The goal is one story every day. This may not actually happen, but try and keep me honest.
- The stories will be in different mediums depending on what I think fits the topic. Most days will probably just be normal prose fiction, but occasionally they’ll be screenplay or stage-play style, and I may toss in a radio show once or twice (among other styles to be named later).
- The topics will come from Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders, which was a great gift from my brother- and sister-in-law for christmas (Thanks!). I’m going to use a random number generator every day to select a page, then again to pick an entry on that page, and I’ll write about that entry. Simple, yeah?
So that’s it. This may all be crap, and that’s fine. The goal is to get the crap out of my system so I can get the good shit rolling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw-8NZ1_ItE&t=5m56s
The best way to find what you love in life is by doing something you hate. A cushy job, a cool job, a job that you like, is comfortable. That comfort breeds complacency, and that complacency breeds stagnation. So you just kind of stay there, a “fine job”, even though it may not be your dream, or your passion. Then all kinds of shit happens, she gets pregnant, you have to buy a car, you have mortgage payments, you have a house, you have this cushy life, and before you know it, you have these handcuffs, these golden handcuffs that is your day job. That you didn’t love, you never loved, it was just an easy job, but now there’s no way out of it. All that happens by doing something that’s cushy and easy. If you get a job that absolutely sucks, something you hate doing, you will spend every minute on the clock fixating and fantasizing about what you wish you were doing.
Casey Neistat (Vlog #49: Special Visitor)
