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> toss everything from your shelf that has not been written before the year 1900 best advice ever! N.N. Taleb aggressively makes this point in Antifragile too

• croo 7y ago
  Writing to contribute to the existing pool of knowledge is not the only reason to write! You may write because of money, fame, to learn a new subject or make a unique set of things already said or because you simply enjoy it.
• PavlovsCat 7y ago
  Granted, there's enough wisdom produced by really brilliant people that a lifetime probably wouldn't be enough to read it all, nevermind understand and apply it all. So I don't disagree. But still, calibrate? Your voice is still a voice, and it's the one you have. There is nothing new under the sun, but at the same time, nobody will ever have the exact outlook on life and the universe as you do. Maybe your writing is really terrible, I wouldn't know. But your heart is in the right place, so how could it be? > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. -- Ira Glass > If only we try to live sincerely, it will go well with us, even though we are certain to experience real sorrow, and great disappointments, and also will probably commit great faults and do wrong things, but it certainly is true, that it is better to be high-spirited, even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, is well done. -- Vincent van Gogh > The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it. -- Margaret Atwood > Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. -- C. S. Lewis > The forest would be pretty quiet if only the best birds sang. -- Proverb (?)
• anthay 7y ago
  Hasn't this comment been made 100 times before?