Posts tagged work
Posts tagged work
If the people around you make you unhappy it’s not their fault. It’s your fault. They’re in your professional or personal life because you drew them to you—and you let them remain.
Nothing is perfect — & nothing is ever really finished. You might think that once you build a successful business, you can take a break. (You can’t.) You might think that once you get married you can stop thinking about romance, spontaneity & improving your communication skills. (You’d be so wrong.) You might think that when you find that best friend who is perfect for you, you can slack off on phonecalls, lunches or keeping in touch. (If you do, they won’t stick around.)
Men are told from birth that their ideas are just as important as their bodies. Men are encouraged to be bold and loud—throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks over and over again—and that’s exactly where great comedy comes from. Comedy clubs are almost always run by men, and they’re safe spaces for men.
If what you really want is to write a novel, and your boyfriend knows this, and yet every time you sit down to write, he says, “Let’s go out to dinner,” or “Game of Thrones is on,” that is not love. That is some controlling, selfish behavior cloaked in plausible deniability (“All I want to do is spend time with my girlfriend.”)
If you have access to family friends who fund foundations, and instead you choose to sing folk songs on the Mall in Washington hoping that the peace and love emanating off of you change the world, then you are practicing nothing but self-indulgence. If you have access to power and you want to help, then you need to access that power.
There’s no person who is innately oblivious to time, as though it were a genetic disorder. We all have values; if someone is perpetually late, she’s getting something out of it — feeling more important than other people, advertising herself as an artsy free spirit, denying her own mortality by refusing to acknowledge the linear march of time, marking her territory like a dog who pisses on clocks.
The same rule applies to independent musicians and comedians. At the solo level, you might be very happy making a living gigging at certain kinds of venues and being supported by a given audience. On the other hand, to support a manager, a band and a label, you can’t just add a few more fans. You need different venues, different gigs, different revenue streams. If you can’t (or don’t want to) get to that new level, the new team isn’t going to help, and it might destroy everything you’ve built.
If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it’s no longer your work—the dependence on approval has corrupted it, turned it into a process where you are striving for ever more approval.
Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships, that is why good ideas are always initially resisted.
You can be debt free at just about any income level, but you have to decide that you hate debt more than you love the possessions it will buy.
